I have griped in the past about the dangers of lock-in, but never figured I would be directly impacted myself. A few weeks ago, my RSS feed started having problems in Bloglines. I’m not sure what caused the problems, but I suspect the Added Values plug-in, which redirected permalinks and may have redirected my RSS feed, is to blame.
At any rate, my feed stopped updating in Bloglines. Now here’s where it gets fun. I contacted Bloglines about the problem, and they said they fixed something with the feed and that it should now work. Unfortunately, it didn’t. So Craig pinged them. This time, Bloglines deleted the non-responsive version of the feed, and said that re-subscribing should fix the problem. Now the number of people subscribing to my feed in Bloglines—or at least the “working version” of my feed—has gone from 41 to 4. At the same time, my average daily traffic has dropped substantially. I think there are a bunch of people who only saw my content through Bloglines and who aren’t coming to the site to check in.
If this were an RSS issue, I might be able to do something to correct it at my end. But since it’s a Bloglines issue, I have no way to notify any of the subscribers of the problem—except to post it here and hope that someone comes across it. Please re-add me to your subscriptions if you want to continue to get information from this site!