Source: Wools, License
This evening, the Bloglines Plumber and Team will be implementing network upgrades in our data center. The scheduled maintenance is expected to occur on 11/27 from 8:00 PM PST to 10:00 PM PST. During this time, Bloglines will not be available.
- The Plumber and The Bloglines Team
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Tag It!Over the weekend, a few individuals, including some of us who work on Bloglines, reported receiving Spam from Bloglines. It was a surprise for us and the few other Blogliners who also received the emails. While the total number of emails sent appear to be small less than 1,000, we think it’s serious enough to address because the spammer impersonated official Bloglines correspondence.
The Event
Emails were sent recommending several posts on a Chinese Blog via the “send a post to a friend” feature on Bloglines. The email ended with a signature from “The Bloglines Team.” The emails were not sent by anyone associated with the Bloglines Team.
The Actions Taken
We monitored our logs and suspended the spammer’s IP address restricting their usage of Bloglines. In addition, on Monday 11/19/07, we briefly shut down the “send email” feature on Bloglines to further monitor the situation.
FYI
Bloglines sends out email to our subscribers for purposes specific to operating Bloglines (registration verification, change password, change of terms of service and other policies, significant product announcements, etc) Most product announcements can be found on the Bloglines News Feed. We take your privacy carefully and will protect our customers from spam.
Take Care.
-Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team
Blogliners, we’re looking to meet you face-to-face for some quality time to discuss how you use a feed reader. We’re looking to meet people who are new to feeds and feed readers. We’ve met a lot of people over the past few months at conferences, the forums on the web, etc. And we love meeting our power users, but now we need to find some users who are new feeds and feed readers.
Here are some key questions to determine if your right for our customer research:
- New to feeds and Bloglines in the past year.
- Consider yourself a non-techie.
- Willing to do some “homework” about 10 minutes a day for a few days.
- Have broadband.
- Live in the Bay Area - a must.
- Willing to meet with our researcher for 90 minutes during the week of 11/29 to 12/7.
Modest compensation will be provided for you time.
Since we know that Bloglines attracts a wide set of people, we want to get a good mix - all ages, home or work users. So we’ve created a short (5 minute) survey to help us find the folks who best represent the Bloglines audience. In turn, we’ll contact you to arrange a meeting with our researcher. If you’re interested, please check out the survey.
Thanks so much!
- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team
As many of you might have noticed, yesterday afternoon, the Plumber returned– Bloglines experienced some downtime. The team has been looking into the situation and has attributed the root cause to multiple machine hardware failure due to human error.
As people who not only work on Bloglines, but use Bloglines, you can be assured that we’re monitoring the situation closely and will put improvements in place to prevent downtime in the future.
- Eric Engleman & the Bloglines Team
We were anxiously awaiting the second week of the Bloglines Top 1000. We had no idea what was in store. To our surprise, we saw what we thought was a bug.
“Pitchfork: Today” skyrocketed 790,000 ranks. That’s right 790,000 ranks to land at 448. We double-checked the numbers and they are correct. Remember, we have millions of feeds in our database, so it is possible to jump thousands of ranks in one week. However, we will consider new ways to report this.
“Sew, Mama, Sew” continued to move its way up 352 rankings.
Confessions of a Pioneer Woman who debuted last week moved up another 303 ranks to land at Rank: 697.
@IT broke into the top 1000 last week with a big push from our Japanese Blogliners.
Search Engine Journal rose with a combination of news and helpful how-to articles like, “10 Places to Fine Free Images Online and Make Your Content More Linkable.“
- Eric Engleman & the Bloglines Team
Earlier this week, we released another round of improvements for Bloglines Beta:
It's Faster
Most people have commented on how fast the Bloglines Beta is, much faster than the classic site. However, a web site can never be too fast! Will, Bjorn and Ben have been reviewing the front-end code looking for ways to shave time off common actions. Hold onto your seats, you'll definitely feel the speed improvements especially in QuickView and 3-Pane View. We hope you relish the time saved not waiting to download. We are.
Back-button Support
Because sometimes in life, you do need to go backwards to go forwards. Now you can use the browser's back button like on standard web sites. Hitting the back button will take you to the previously loaded screen.
Expandable Start Page Modules
Some feeds just demand more space on your start page. Now you can change the size of the start page modules with a simple drag-and-expand of the lower right-hand corner of the module.
Better Support for Smaller Screens
We've noticed a number of Blogliners complaining that they were not able to see the "Mark All Read" and "Edit" buttons in the feed header. We've modified the header to better support smaller screen sizes and those who use a narrower browser window.
Enjoy!
- Eric Engleman & The Bloglines Team
Warning: This post might cause strong reactions. Please do not operate heavy machinery while reading.
Sew, Mama, Sew! debuts this week in the Bloglines Top 1000, climbing 790 spots from last week to claim the title of Biggest Mover. It leapt over top feeds like USATODAY.com Travel - Top Stories and the Drudge Report. Other feeds on the move include Marc Andreessen's blog.pmarca.com, Design*Sponge, and MIT's Technology Review Feed. Coming in at 1000 and debuting for the first time is 1000 Confessions of a Pioneer Woman. It's a great example of a independent voice that has attracted a strong community. Pioneer Woman has great stories and sweet photos (we love the cinnamon rolls.)
Why the Bloglines Top 1000?
People ask us all the time about what Blogliners read. We've had the Bloglines Top 200 for the last couple of years, but wanted to highlight even more independent voices. We felt this was important because many have been lamenting the demise of blogging. As you can see, there are a number of great blogs and even more on the way. Blogliners subscribe to tech feeds like Slashdot, Gizmodo and Boing-Boing, however, Blogliners also subscribe to non-tech feeds like Comics, Dictionary.com's Word of the Day, Yarn Harlot, New Urban Legends and Cute Overload (a staff favorite). The Bloglines Top 1000 covers a wide spectrum of sites. Be sure to spend some time perusing the list; it's a great way to see what your fellow Blogliners are reading.
How do you calculate the Bloglines Top 1000?
We don't want to go into too much detail, but at the core, we're tracking the number of “active” subscribers who interact with a feed during a specific time period. We're assuming some individuals will attempt to game the system, so we're going to keep the actual method somewhat quiet for now. Be sure to not though, we are tracking indivdiual feed urls, so some sites may have multiple listings.
Do feeds in the default packages rise to the top?
Default feeds or "Quick Picks" receive additional promotion which do cause them rise to the top. Many of the our current packs are a bit old and we're in the process of updating the packs as part of our redesign, based on feedback from Blogliners.
Does the Bloglines Top 1000 illustrate any larger trends?
Yes, we think so. Feeds are being generated by a wide-variety of sites and are being consumed by an ever broader set of people; they're not just for blogs or just for the technically inclined.
Does this herald the end of blogging?
Contrary to what some may say, no. People crave social connection; blogging will continue.
Is Bloglines attacking Technorati’s final stronghold?
Not at all. Bloglines has had a listing of top feeds for several years, though it used to only be the top 200. We're updating the rankings and our methodology as part of our redesign.
We've been comparing our fall release cycle to a mad-dash European tour. If it's Tuesday, it must be Paris. It's Tuesday! We're probably launching our latest release for Bloglines Beta.
Today's release focuses on the personalization settings to optimize your feed reading experience. We have a combination of something old, something new, something borrowed and of course, the site is blue.
Where to go?
Look in the header and you'll see the word "settings." Click on it. The personalization settings page will appear.
What's New?
- Mark Individual Posts as Read - You can now choose between Bloglines Classic or Bloglines Beta mark read behavior. You can either mark individual posts as read or mark the entire folder as read. The current default is to mark individual feeds read. We'll continue to monitor the comments around this setting closely. We know this is very important to our long-time Blogliners. In addition, I want to thank those who gave us feedback commented in the forums or posted on the web. Note - we want to make sure the people who have stood by Bloglines continue to do so. So we're listening to you all.
- Remember View - Many people like to have a single view across all of their feeds. This way there is consistency for feed reading. However, some have discovered the beauty of selecting different views for different feeds. For example, many like to read feeds with lots posts in quick view whereas comic feeds look better in Full View. To each his own. The current default is to have all feeds stick with one view.
- Use Feed CSS - CSS Support can be turned on or off. CSS means we will deliver the feed in the style as defined by the publisher. The current default is to have CSS Support on.
What's Old?
- Phone and Mobile settings - Fine tune your experience to make the most when you're on the go.
- User settings such as creating a user name which is necessary to establish an OpenID with Bloglines
- Change email and password.
Now Something a little Different
- Sort Oldest/Sort Newest - You'll notice this no longer a global preference available from the settings page. Now when you click sort Oldest/Sort News is changes the sorting view for all feeds.
We appreciate all the support you've given us over the years.
Enjoy!
- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team
Bloglines has had a leading mobile feed reader for the last couple of years. It's always been one of our key product strengths. So we were really excited to make our mobile product even better. We were busy over the summer re-writing the mobile code from the ground up. A new version of mobile is available as part of the Bloglines Beta Releases. Go to m.beta.bloglines.com on your cell phone. When we feel it's ready, we'll make it available on Bloglines Classic. Key Features
- Start Page - Your Bloglines Start Page is displayed at the top of the screen. This way you can pull your favorite feeds to the top.
- Pin (formerly known as Keep New) - Sometimes you want to save that special post to read later when you're not on the go.
- Pagination - Instead of loading all of your posts, we parse out the posts into smaller bundles to fit into the memory constraints of cell phone browser. This has numerous benefits including improved speed, better reliability and safer "mark read" behavior.
Enjoy!
- Kelvin Nishikawa and the Bloglines Team
Today is our first release devoted to supporting OpenID for Bloglines Classic and Bloglines Beta. In the near future, Bloglines will also support consuming OpenIDs and OpenID 2.0 which was just released this week.
Now our more technical users will know right way what's going on and will be excited. In that case, you can go to id.bloglines.com and get started. Note - OpenID is just the beginning of us working with true open standards. Other formats getting our attention include oAuth (Open Authentication) and APML (Attention Profiling Mark-up Language). For the rest of you, let me outline a little bit about OpenID and what it will offer you in the future.
OpenID allows you to create an identity online and use that identity to login to any OpenID supported site. In other words, you will no longer need to create a new username and password for every single website. How many times have you gone to a site and forgotten your login. You might ask yourself, was the username "joe578" or "joejoe" or "bigjoe" or "joeanne?"
Now you can imagine that if your favorite sites allowed you to login with a single ID you would be able combine services and create some pretty cool mashups. You would be able to pick and choose the sites you like to use and the features you want.
While OpenID is getting some momentum from major sites who have offered
OpenIDs, it is still very early. So in the meantime, you will still
need multiple IDs. But keep looking for the 
OpenID symbol. You will see
it popping up more and more.
If you're looking to get better informed about OpenID you can check out the OpenID Foundation or a few of the bloggers who cover the topic.
Enjoy!
- Rob Emanuele and the Bloglines Team
It's been a fast and furious last few weeks as the Bloglines Team has released four releases in four weeks. We've released "Pin", "Email Post", inline styles, and now as of today support for OpenID. New Personalization Preferences and Bloglines Beta Mobile. We went back and forth about how we should get the word out. Should we post over several days, make one massive post, or break it up into different posts, We decided to launch at once and blog at once; we have detailed posts for each of these releases, in case you want to read more.
- OpenID - Bloglines Beta and Bloglines Classic will both support OpenID. Going forward we'll support consuming OpenID, OpenID 2.0 and are investigating the use of other Open Standards such as oAuth and APML.
- Mobile - Bloglines Beta now has a new version of Bloglines Mobile with additional features such as the "Start Page", "Pin" and improved browser support.
- New Personalization Preferences - Bloglines Beta has added several new personalization features as well as implementing support for the current feed reading personalization features.
We're going to keep the pace up and continue releasing features left and right.
Enjoy!!
- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team
Last night, we released support for publisher defined style-sheets. This means going forward Bloglines will display publisher created CSS (cascading style-sheets) in the main reading views.
Why Do Publishers use CSS?
Most publishers use CSS to ensure content is designed consistently across browsers. If the publisher uses CSS in their feed, you'll see the publishers style-sheet.
What does this mean for me?
You'll see the content as the publisher designed it. A good example brought to our attention is the use of the "float" tag. Many bloggers use this tag to wrap text around an image. In the past, we wouldn't wrap the text around the image. Now we do. There are lots of other examples of how the content will be displayed a little differently. A full list of all of the CSS style attributes we support is located here.
For the most part everyone, will benefit because most publishers attempt to make their feeds readable for feed readers. In addition, we figure that the people who track a few of their friends' feeds will probably like to see more for their friends "style" in their feed reader. However, some publishers might make stylistic decisions which might make it hard for people to scan content quickly (small grey typeface on a black-background). That's why we built an option to turn this CSS Support off. If the publisher's design style is making it hard for you to scan and read your feeds, just to go Account Settings, Feed Options and turn off the CSS Support.
We want our Blogliners and bloggers to be happy.
Enjoy!
- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team
PS: If this text is blue then your reader supports CSS.
Over the last couple of weeks, we've been chatting with Blogliners in our forums, reviewing mailed in feedback and reading your blogs. It's been fun to see how excited people are about Bloglines. We aim to keep you that way.
The latest launch offers up Inline Editing of Feeds and Folders. We pushed it out last night. It looks like we were caught by Nathan Weinberg. Here's a quick summary.
Inline Edit Feeds and Folders - You can change the feed or folder title name and set individual feed/folder settings such as display updated items, display in Bloglines notifier, display in Bloglines Mobile and of course set your privacy settings for your feed or folder. See screenshot below.
You might ask, "What does it mean to set my privacy settings for a feed or folder?" If you have your settings as public, your feed library is available to the world. Here's an example of a part of my feed library so you can see what I read.
The next set of releases will feature personalization preferences including:
- New preferences allowing you to select different read/unread modes (Classic or Beta)
- Bloglines Mobile
- "Clippings" which will be renamed "Saved."
We'll keep you posted as we get closer.
Enjoy!
- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team
Source cohdra
Last week we launched our beta site and it looks like many of you noticed. The overall response was exceptionally favorable, but one topic was lost in the excitement: the site is still under construction! Many people thought we were done. On the other hand, a number of our classic Blogliners pointed out several of their favorite features missing or not implemented quite right. Both parties are right. If the beta currently fulfills your needs, great move right in. If it doesn't fulfill your needs right now, don't fret, we still have a large number of features to implement and a few features to refine. Take your time.
We've been listening to our core users and rolled out several features from Bloglines Classic which were frequently requested by our Blogliners. Keep an eye out for these new icons:
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Keep as New - retitled "Pin" - This feature temporarily saves a post in the reading view. It's very useful for when you see a large post, but don't have enough time to read the post. |
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Email this - One of the great things about a feed reader is sharing all of the great posts you discover. Click on the email button at the bottom of a post and you can send those especially interesting posts to a friend. |
We've also implemented a couple of other features available in the current site.
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Help - We've implemented a dynamic help site using Right Now Technologies. It'll allows us to create help articles on the fly. We're also going to experiment with pointing out to great help content created by our user community. So if we see a great tutorial someone has written, we just might link to you. |
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Hotkeys - The majority of hotkeys are working:
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I've included a couple of screenshots for your viewing pleasure.
We'll continue to listen to Blogliners in the forums and across the web. Our next set of features we're working on will include editing feed subscription preferences and creation of additional beta preferences that will allow you to configure the beta to handle read/unread posts just like in classic Bloglines.
We'll keep you all posted as we get closer. Again thanks for the feedback.
- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team.
Photo Courtesy of StockVault
Wow! We were a little overwhelmed by the positive response our Beta received earlier in the week. We expected a few in the tech-set to write reviews, but never imagined the out-pouring of excitement. I thought I would share some of the high-points.
- Read Write/Web did an exceptionally detailed review and here's a little except, "Bloglines has me back as a fan!"
- Even the competition likes Blogline Beta. Chris Wetherall of Google Reader described Bloglines as, "Wicked Cool."
- 3,000 posts were written across the web. Most of these from Blogliners excited about the return of Bloglines. I love you Blogliners!
- Lots of people were and continue to discuss future releases of Bloglines in our Forums.
But we also wanted you to know that we heard another message---Don't take too long to release additional features!
We'll be listening to you and announcing additional features going forward. In fact, our next feature slated for release is "Keep as New." This was the single most-requested item from active Blogliners. We're working on it right now. We'll keep you posted on this and other releases as we get closer.
Cheers!
Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team
Blogliners we're proud to introduce a beta of our latest redesign of Bloglines. Our About Beta overview outlines the key features a personalizable home page, 3 reading-views and drag-and-drop foldering in an Ajax interface. We're inviting you, the Bloglines fans, to the new Bloglines beta in the redesign cycle to provide us feedback. We look forward meeting you in the forums or at conferences to brainstorm on ways to make Bloglines an even better feed reader.
The current Beta is available for Firefox and IE 7 browsers. Of course, the full-featured original Bloglines will still be available during the Beta period.
Enjoy!
- The Bloglines Team
You know a conference is going to be good when the first person you run into is one of your power users. For Gnomedex 2007, my first conference as the new GM of Bloglines, I hoped to meet many Bloglines fans, and sure enough, I wasn't disappointed. Mike Davidson, CEO of Newsvine, who says his second most important thing in life is Bloglines, got me started off in style We chatted and he told me some of his favorite features and the way he uses Bloglines. He likes the hack by John Hicks for a Mac-like interface.
Later in the day, I got to meet Stan James, Founder and CTO of Lijit. Friends told me to be sure to talk to him. He's a bit of a wunderkind who got VC interest in his PHD dissertation. Also, he's a big fan of Bloglines and has been analyzing public Bloglines data and talking with other researchers for a while now.
On Saturday, I was spacing out for a moment when I noticed the person in front of me scanning through loads of feeds at lightspeed. Once I noticed the Bloglines logo, I knew we had to chat. It turned out to be Arieanna Schweber, a long-time Bloglines user. We chatted for a bit and she pointed out a few things she would like to enhance in the future. She also works at B5 who is looking to hire bloggers.
I've been busy the last couple of months working with the team to define our next major releases. We've been talking to Blogliners and charting the next generation version of feed readers. I look forward to meeting all of the big fans of Bloglines at future conferences and of course in our user forums.
We'll keep you posted on key events going forward. We can't wait to show you what we've been working on.
Cheers.
- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team
Our latest version of iBloglines brings even more features to the iPhone, so many more features we consider this our "Ultimate Pro" Edition. No other feed reader comes close. It's clear that iBloglines rules the feed reading space on the iPhone. Here's the latest set of iBloglines goodness:
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Pin - Save the story for when you get back to your Mac or PC. |
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Email Articles - Sharing is fun. |
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Search - Find the latest buzz with our blog and feed search. |
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Auto Refresh of "My Library" - No need to hit refresh to get the latest updates. |
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Hide Images - We know EDGE is slow, and your time is valuable. |
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Preferences - Personalizing is essential. Our Blogliners love to personalize their experience so they can optimize their feed reading flow. |
Have Fun!
- The Bloglines Team
Unlike most of the tech world, we've been doing more than just playing with our beloved new iPhones. We've been adapting our apps to integrate with them. Case in point: our lead developers Paul Querna's weekend project, now complete and known to us as iBloglines. We then gathered our iPhone enabled staff to test iBloglines (and, in general, marvel over our new toys).
Thanks to our team, I can present to you iBloglines, optimized for the iPhone. iPhoners, fire up your browsers and go to i.bloglines.com. Then touch/tap your screen to feed-reading heaven.
As a preview here's a screenshot of iBloglines.
Enjoy!
- The Bloglines Team
If you haven't noticed any problems with your Bloglines service over the last 2-3 days, you can stop reading here.
For those of you who MAY have noticed a small hiccup or two, there's a simple reason for it: Some of the new services we rolled out last week have been restarting due to a small glitch in our network protocol.
These hiccups rarely occur and last a very short amount of time--less than one second. Even so, we wanted you to know that we have tracked down the issue and fixed the problem.
We're sorry about the inconvenience and will continue to monitor the situation.
-The Bloglines Team
Bloglines will be performing some system upgrades on Thursday, March 29 from 8:00pm-11:00pm PDT. During this time, the site will not be accessible. We apologize for the inconvenience and hope to be back up to speed shortly.
-The Bloglines Team