Tuesday afternoon I logged into Bloglines to read my feeds and found that somehow all of my feeds had magically disappeared. If you’re a blogger you probably understand that sick feeling that started to well up in my gut.
First I thought, “Oh, Bloglines must be down”, so I logged out and logged in again. Still nothing. Then I started thinking about all the time it was going to take to re-create those feeds (knowing full well I should have had a back up). In the meantime, I kept logging in and logging out as if my feeds were going to suddenly reappear. Nothing.
Finally I sent and email to Bloglines and asked them what was going on. I also did a Google search for “Bloglines data lost”. My heart began to sink into my stomach as I found a multitude of blog posts over the past year, from bloggers who had lost their feeds.
By the next morning I was ready to start from scratch, but this time with a different RSS aggregator. I checked Bloglines one more time. To my surprise all of my feeds re-appeared just as magically as they had disappeared.
I didn’t waste a second exporting the feeds into Google Reader. With a sigh of relief I sent another email to Bloglines. This time it simply said, “Please cancel my account”.
They never bothered to respond to my original email, but this is the response they sent to my cancellation request:
“Per your request your account has been canceled. We regret any inconvenience you may have experienced and hope you will re-join Bloglines in the future.”
I found it interesting that they never acknowledged the email about the “disappearing feeds”, but seemed to allude to knowing that there may have been an inconvenience.
Google Reader is proving to be an excellent replacement choice so far. There is something about the interface that makes the feed reading experience feel easier and faster.
Google Reader’s features work a little bit differently than Bloglines, but I’m happy to say that I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the ease of the transition. Quite honestly, I wish I had tried it months ago!
If you’re thinking about changing RSS aggregators Google Reader gets my endorsement!
Oh…and don’t forget to backup your feeds. This could have been a very time consuming lesson.
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