OddThinking

Bloglines Ask For Public Feedback

Bloglines, a web-based feed-aggregator has invited people to blog their feedback on their application (and on other products).

It is an interesting approach. They are inviting user grumbles to be published widely on blogs around the world, but presumably are hoping that the number of bloggers implicitly endorsing that they use the Bloglines product might be enough to attract more people than the bad publicity scares away.

Oh, and perhaps incidentally they think they might get some valuable user feedback to help their product, but I am sure that is a secondary concern. 🙂

My Response

I’ll take the bait. I’ll admit to using Bloglines, and provide some feedback here.

As always, when I list the parts of a product I would like to see changed, I necessarily focus on the negatives, and risk giving people the wrong impression that I don’t like the product. That is likely to happen here. Let me emphasize that Bloglines is a tool that I have grown to rely on. It is a great tool, and the fact that it is free is one of those weird happinesses about the Internet.

Oops, I almost forget. I have to use the phrase Bloglines freedback to attract their attention.

My Usage

Let me start with my credentials and an overview of how I use Bloglines.

I subscribe to over 120 feeds. I use several machines to read them.

Bloglines is the only feed aggregating tool that I have used significantly, so I am not in a position to compare.

Previously, I organised my feeds into categories based on whether I knew the author personally, whether the author was a professional blogger, whether I was the author, etc. Now I organise my feeds into priorities, so I check the Priority 1 feeds before I check Priority 2 feeds.

I don’t have a Bloglines blog. I don’t use Clippings. I don’t email articles. My subscriptions are public, but I don’t tell other people about my feeds, so no-one looks at it.

Issues with Bloglines

RHS Truncation

My biggest problem with Bloglines is that many blogs seem to have their feeds displayed just slightly wider than the right hand window, so I have to use a horizontal scrollbar to read each line. (I typically use IE 6 on Windows.) Resizing the window doesn’t help – it gets scaled larger. This doesn’t happen all the time, and I haven’t attempted to isolate it.

LHS Truncation

The text in the left-hand tree frequently doesn’t fit on the screen. The text that is hidden is often the New versus “Kept New” Unread counts, so I can’t tell if I really want to click on a bolded feed. There may be a better way to display this difference rather than on the right of a long, variable-length, string in a narrow window.

More Powerful Search

I want to be informed everytime someone mentions my web-site or my blog on their blog. However, I don’t want to be informed when I mention it, because I talk about it all the time! Let me limit my search to exclude some sites, such as my own.

Auto-Collapse

I would like the option to have the tree start out as completely collapsed everytime I start Bloglines, rather than trying to be helpful by remembering based on where I happened to be last time. Where the interesting articles were yesterday is unrelated to where they are today.

No feeds were found

Suppose I am on a web-page that is interesting, and I use the fantastic “Sub with Bloglines” bookmark shortcut to subscribe to it, but the site doesn’t have the appropriate headers to point to its feed(s).

Bloglines takes me to a page that says:

No feeds were found. Please verify that the website publishes an RSS feed.

That’s fair enough, but could you please include an edit box, pre-populated with the unsuitable URL, and let me manually edit it to the correct feed URL?

Why is This Article Marked?

I mark articles as “Keep Unread” for several reasons:

• The article contains an enclosure that requires a more powerful machine/faster network connection/different software to read, and I will try again later on a different machine.
• The article is provocative, and I want to think about it, blog about it or comment on it later.
• Bloglines just displayed 30 articles from a feed, and I only have time to read five now, so I need to manually mark the rest as unread.

When I come back to read Bloglines, I need to know why I marked it as unread to decide whether to read it now. Can I please have different coloured flags or similar?

Perhaps I should have to indicate when I finish reading each article? ACtually, I am not sure about this suggestion, so use it carefully!

Mark All Unread

Scenario: I’m halfway through reading a feed and I get interrupted. Let me mark all the articles on the page as unread, please.

View all Marked Posts

It seems weird when the left-hand tree says I have 6 articles marked as “Keep New”, but when I click on the link I see none, because they are older than a week, or whatever date my filter is. To see them, I need to display all the articles, and the wade through looking for the small tick in the checkbox.

There should be a “Display All Kept New” articles feature, no matter how old they are.

Article Updates

I am in a usage rut. My pattern is to ask to see the updated articles of an author. I assume that the changes will be significant and worth reading – more news about the issue they are discussing, retractions etc.

Then I get overwhelmed by re-reading the same article with minor spelling corrections and the like that authors do to their posts after they are published. Eventually I realise this and ask Bloglines to ignore changes for that feed. When I subscribe to the next feed, I optimistically start the process again.

It would be nice to see the diffs on how an article was updated.

It would be nice if there was an indication that this was an update, rather than a new article, clearly marked before you started reading it (e.g. coloured bar).

It would be fantastic if there was some convention, supported by Atom and the major blogging software, by which authors could indicate that the changes were minor typo fixes, as opposed to substantial corrections, and hence not worth re-reading.

Colours

Talking of colours, I have noticed that there is sometimes a change in colour (black versus blue writing), but I have never worked out what it indicates, and I haven’t found anything in the help.

URL Mismatch

I seem to type in the Bloglines URL a lot, rather than using a bookmark. There’s no good reason for this, and I hope I am in the minority. Probably for historical reasons, the URL that ends in /myblogs maps to the feature called My Feeds, not the feature called My Blog. There must be a way to clean this up.

Conclusion

I hope these suggestions are clear enough; I am happy to dig down further if you have any questions.

I hope not more than one or two of them are already solved, and I’m just using it wrong!

I would even consider being part of a beta plan if it would help.

I hope this helps, and thanks for a great tool.