The end of Bloglines

Via this post to Google Reader blog I’ve learned the Bloglines news.  The service will be closed on October 1st.

Today, Ask.com let our users know that we will shut down Bloglines on October 1. Not an easy decision, especially considering our loyal and supportive (not to mention patient) user base, but, ultimately, the right one given business reasons simply too hard to ignore.

While I myself switched four years ago, I know that some people are still using the service (hi mom!).  Everyone is encouraged to migrate to some other news reader. My recommendation is, of course, Google Reader.  And the migration process should be simple and straight forward: export subscriptions as a single OPML file from Bloglines and import them into Google Reader.

While Google Reader is a superior service these days, it came later and from a bigger company than the original Bloglines.  Back, when people were just figuring out how to use RSS en masse, Bloglines offered a simple and very convenient way.  It was so simple in fact, that you didn’t need to know much about RSS at all.  It was so simple, that even my mother, who avoids web services as much as possible, was able to use and enjoy it.

And even though I haven’t used Bloglines at all in the last four years, it’s sad to see it go.  For me it was one of those milestones in the Web history.

Bad morning. Bad!

I just woke up and logged in. News time. I navigated to Bloglines, but it greeted me with “There is a problem with the database. Please try again later”. I thought – “yeah, well, that’s perfect time to read something that I’ve bookmarked a long time ago and never had a chance to come back to”. So I tried to load my Delicious bookmarks. Nope, no chance. I got only “del.icio.us is down for maintenance. we’ll be back in one hour.”…

Oh, my! What’s going on? Who’s next? Slashdot? Google? I rushed to check both of them, but they seem to be OK. Good. I’ll have something to read for the next hour.

Daily del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2005-11-20

Google Reader vs. Bloglines

As you might know, Google has offered a new service to the Internet community – an RSS/Atom aggregator called Google Reader. I’ve heard many people liked it. Being an active user of RSS/Atom aggregator Bloglines I thought I would check it out. There are a few things that I want that Bloglines hasn’t implemented yet, and there are a few things that could have been implemented better. So I was wondering if Google Reader had it right.

Continue reading Google Reader vs. Bloglines

Scary Bloglines thingy

The scariest thing just happened now with me and Bloglines. I was scrolling through my feeds, reading occasional items. And there was one feed that I wanted to unsubscribe. I never ever tested the unsubscribe from feed functionality from my phone before, so I was somewhat worried. But I click it anyway. And it says OK. And done.

I wanted to go read the rest of the items, but it looked like there were no feeds. It got me worried even more. I quickly went to my blogroll page to see if any feeds are there, but it was empty. Nothing. Not even one.

By this time I was practically freaking out. So I jumped to my computer and used the normal browser to navigate to Bloglines. I was hoping to see the plumber, but Bloglines seemed just fine.

I clicked to open my feeds and the folder was empty. I started to feel the pain of a heart attack. Decided to re-subscribe to a few feeds that I could at least remember. And, oh thanks to all the superpowers, I see this error message:

There is a problem with the database.

And before I finished writing this post all my feeds were back. And before finishing this post, I did the backup of all my public feeds into OPML file.