There’s been a lot of discussion (see TechCrunch, What I Learned Today, and Law.Librarians, among others) about Bloglines and the problems they’ve been having. I noticed today that Bloglines has returned to the status quo ante — RSS4Lib’s subscriber numbers, as inaccurate and wonky as they may be, have returned to where they were before I noticed the precipitous drop. Looking at my log files, I see that the Bloglines crawler now reports that I have 799 subscribers to the RSS feed (and 56 to the Atom). That actually represents growth over the last consistent numbers Bloglines provided via the crawler and, not unusually, a few more than Bloglines reports on its web site (its Beta site is more up-to-date, reporting the same 799 RSS feed subscribers as its crawler does).
Bloglines posted on its technical blog yesterday a brief note about the outage. It was Apple-esque in the level of details — it offered none — other than to say that the problem was fixed:
Some folks might have noticed that specific feeds were not updating recently on Bloglines, and we wanted to update you and fill you in on whatâs been going on. We have figured out what the glitch has been. Over the weekend, a fix was released on Bloglines to resolve the issue. All feeds should now be updating and back to normal. If you’re still experiencing problems you can report a stuck feed.
I still prefer Bloglines to Google Reader (call me old-fashioned), but was about to make the leap. I’m pleased the Bloglines is still alive and keeping their crawlers and index going. Google needs the competition — even if it’s not as serious as it could be.