Flaky Feed Services Rant

ONE USE FOR FEED SERVERS

Observations from a struggling new blogger.

As per recommendations from several websites, I've subscribed to a couple of feed services and have thus far found them extremely flaky and/or user unfriendly. The three being at this stage Feedster, Technorati and Feedburner.

Feedster is a nightmare in user friendliness and buggy code. Last time this blog was updated on Feedster was 1 month ago. And to remotely even find an article one has to type in the blog address which sort of defeats the whole purpose of having a feed. The user panel spits out null results and often results don't materialise at all. I've claimed my feed to get some sort of web presence, I go to the MyFeedster section where I can edit my feeds (This page is cool it's main body section is EXACTLY the same as the frame). I get the message

Whoops! First you need to visit the Claim Your Feed page.

Which I've already done. So being a coding dumbass I assume its MY fault, go to the "claim my feed" page again, cut and paste the feed address from my blog settings page, reclaim the feed, cut and paste the auto generated code from Feedster into the Godawful blogspot composer, republish the website again, go back to Feedster to press the FINAL "Claim my Feeds" button which should tie every thing up. My heart sings when I get the message.

Success!
Congratulations. Feedster now knows that you are the owner of your feed and you can begin to edit your claimed feed(s).

Clicking the edit your claimed feeds gives me.

Whoops! First you need to visit the Claim Your Feed page.

Back to square one again. I've done this 5 times now and given up on Feedster altogether. It is as Gudjieff says "le merde de le merde".

Technorati says it will send a snippet of code to my email once I claim my feed. I can then make my feed service more relevant. The email with the snippet has failed to turn up. Add to this my user password was denied this morning which had to be reset (to the exact same password!). An email sent to support-at-technoratidotcom has resulted in a robot reply with a reference number in the eighty thousand range. Yeah, like I'm going to hear from them!

Feedburner....... can't even log on to their main page. It was DOWN. ****Edit**** one of the guys from Feedburner has actually contacted me (very quickly) so I suppose the feeds there are working and he didn't get his feed from Feedster. This is how a GOOD FEED should work. A real person contacting in around 40 minutes (how COOL is that!!!!!) kudos to Dick Costolo and Feedburner crew. You've given me faith in what seemed the faceless web organizations.

I suppose you get what you pay for but this whole feed business reminds me of the web circa 1994.

Blogspot in dashboard mode seems to be in perpetual "waiting" time when clicking on links, depending on the link, position of the planet Mercury, the feng shui of my office and the state of karma between my computer and the server in the USA. Even saving draft copies can end up in a "Sorry but you lost all that" message. I've learnt to back up long pieces using cut and paste onto my clipboard.

Computer Haiku

A file that big?
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.

So far the best feed service is from Firefox where you can load a live bookmark to keep up with blogs of interest.