Feed Management & Bloglines Support

I was doing some basic housecleaning on the blog this week, and noticed that if you tried to subscribe to my weblog’s feed using Bloglines, you were faced with the option of subscribing to 4 different RSS feeds. To be clear from the start, the only feed you need for my weblog is the following: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheTrendJunkie . I thought that was the case, however, what I found when I tried to subscribe to my weblog, was that first there was the Feedburner feed, accompanied by the standard Wordpress RSS 2.0 feed, which followed with a feed for the comments and then a feed for my OLD Blogger account! Gee, you think that could be a little confusing for a novice RSS user? Good luck trying to figure that one out unless you are a member of the blogorati, and have been tinkering with aggregators for the past year!

After several attempts, from both myself and my good friend flipthedolphin, on trying to remove all of the old feeds from my headers and auto-discovery, the fact remained that when you tried to subscribe to my blog using Bloglines you kept getting the four options I mentioned above. Very frustrating! Finally, I submitted to contacting Blogline’s for some suggestions or assistance, not knowing what the problem could be. I am happy to report that Bloglines responded to my request in just about 24 hours, with a complete resolution and explaination:

We have indexed the correct URL for your blog at http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheTrendJunkie. It may take some time for the correct number of subscribers to show up on your blog. Please note that all who were subscribed to your previous feed URLs (now removed from our system) have automatically been redirected to your main, active feed. This requires no effort on their part; the old feed is simply replaced with the new, valid feed in their Bloglines account.

We have tested this repeatedly, so we know you haven’t lost any subscribers. We are currently working on the issue that is preventing the automatic correct subscription number from taking effect immediately. We do regret any confusion.

Indeed, when I logged back into my Bloglines account for the first time since the support email, all of my other feed subscriptions were removed, and the only feed that remained for my blog was the Feedburner one. Mission accompolished! Nice work Bloglines.

UPDATE: After another 24 hours, I noticed my Bloglines subscriptions went up to 27 from 22, I was worried there were a few other folks out there subscribed to one of the other feeds. Thanks again Bloglines.

Tags: bloglines, feed management, RSS, feedburner, the trend junkie

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