Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

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 del.icio.us 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.

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

• List of news aggregators — Wikipedia entry
  Tagged as: aggregators applications atom lists news rss services software syndication tools web wiki wikipedia xml
• How much did Ask Jeeves pay for Bloglines? — Speculation in The Internet Stock Blog
  Tagged as: bloglines business money
• Open Text Summarizer — Shorten those long and boring texts into something you can read
  Tagged as: algorithms analysis applications code freeware gpl ideas language linux programming scripts software summary tools unix writing
• RSS Market Share — from Burning Questions - The Official FeedBurner Weblog
  Tagged as: aggregators blog bloglines business rss software stats syndication tools traffic web
• Getting started with Ruby (Loud Thinking)
  Tagged as: development documentation guides programming resources ruby tutorials
• Ask Jeeves Possibly Paid Between $30 and $50 Million for Bloglines — Speculation in Search Engine Journal
  Tagged as: bloglines business money
• Internet Down — Very realistic clip that shows what happens when office stays without Internet for far too long (like 2 minutes or so)
  Tagged as: fun funny geeks humor internet office video web
• Mark Fletcher’s Blog: RSS Aggregator I looked at — On the origins of Bloglines
  Tagged as: article blog bloglines history

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.

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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.

The other day I noticed a few updates, but not all of them. BlogLines announced all the recent changes in this news article and it turns out that I noticed only the small subset.

The biggest and most welcome change - keyboard navigation. Now, instead of scrolling feeds with a lot of items and switching between feeds while moving the mouse all over the screen, one can use keyboard shortcuts. ‘j‘ and ‘s‘ are my two favourites. By pressing ‘j‘ it is no possible to jump to the next item in the feed. No scrolling. No mouse. Simply go there. By pressing ‘s‘ it is trivial to go to the next feed with unread items. Again, no mouse involved. Just these two keyboard shortcuts speed up reading a lot. And I needed the whole two seconds to get used to them. Amazing!

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