Blogger.com feeds deemed annoying

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20 Sep 2006

If you use Blogger.com for your blog, you’ve just lost a subscriber. Sorry, I really liked your content, but the constant and random switches that Blogger makes between full and partial feeds has finally broken my will.

Several times a day I end up with dozens of "new" items in my reader simply because the feed contents changed from a full to a partial feed or vice versa. For a while, I just told my reader not to re-display updated feed items, but it seemed that every time a feed was actually updated, Blogger decided to show a partial item.

Blogger was a pioneer—even I used Blogger for a year shortly after starting this blog. But it seems that Google’s ignoring their acquisition. Things aren’t getting better, they’re getting worse.

BillSaysThis
September 20, 2006 4:53 PM

My feed is not showing this problem, so it's probably just from beta blogs.

Bryan Price
September 20, 2006 7:05 PM

That's interesting. I've noticed the same thing happening, I just didn't realize that it was Blogger blogs doing this. I use Blogger myself, but I haven't seen anything like that happening with my feed. Of course I subscribe to it myself. How many times have I caught an error that way! :-D And yes, I do find that annoying.

ivv
September 20, 2006 9:35 PM

Sucks. Blogger indeed seems to be in the state of deep neglect and one can only hope Google treats its other pet projects better. On the other hand, I wonder whether the reader isn't to blame, at least to a degree. I'm monitoring my own Blogger blogs with Omea and don't remember having these kinds of problems.

Graham
September 21, 2006 2:54 AM

It's about time someone pointed this out. Blogger is not reader friendly at all. This is true for both the site itself as well as the feed. Not only does it seem to switch between full and partial it also seems to arbitrarily decide when it wants to include images or not. I absolutely hate it. Regarding the site itself...the comment system absolutely sucks and no trackbacks (although fewer bloggers seem to be using trackbacks these days anyway). And get rid of that damn bar on top of the page. Does anyone use that feature? Unfortunately most bloggers in my genre seem to use blogger, therefore I will grin and bear it. Thanks for giving me this space to rant along with you.

Jason Lancaster
September 22, 2006 12:33 PM

Huh. Odd that I have not seen this behavior in my blogger reads. Is this actually every blogger user you read?

Ashish C.
September 26, 2006 3:48 AM

I have a blogger blog and it shows the same problem, Blogger was once a leader in the blogging world but right now its in a period of self-stagnation. WordPress is much better....

This discussion has been closed.

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