Outsourced Clue Blog

Long story short, I have ditched Bloglines and currently only use NetnewsWire for my RSS reader.

I have been using Bloglines as long as I can remember using RSS. I loved their web interface and stability. When I switched to the Mac platform full time from Linux, I start using NetNewsWire which had excellent integration with Bloglines (you can subscribe to your Blogline feeds and it would keep the read/unread status in sync).

Over the last year, Bloglines has had some major issues I tried to ignore initially. First, their API (which Netnewswire uses to sync feeds) has been very unstable. I often get prompted for my Bloglines password from Netnewswire (which is caused by an API issue on the Bloglines), and Netnewswire is stupid in that it will keep prompting you and with over 500 feeds, you can imagine how annoying that is.

The second (and by far the largest issue) is that Bloglines has “forgotten” the read status of my feeds. I.e. I will get 500 new items from each feed, as if I had never read them. So I have to mark all those read while trying to keep up on the items I really haven’t read. That happened about 2 months ago. It just happened again yesterday, which was the last straw. So I exported my bloglines list as an OPML file, deleted all my feeds in Netnewswire, and imported the OPML, so I subscribe directly to the feeds.

Will Bloglines miss me? Nah, I wasn’t their ideal customer as I didn’t use their web interface, but it is a bummer as I have been a long time user (near the beginning of when they first launched). Oh well, bummer.