rss

Bloglines beta site remains down this morning, victim of an expired and apparently neglected security certificate. Meanwhile, "classic" Bloglines still exhibits the classic problems that led me to try the beta months ago:

• Item refresh counts out of whack
• Showing thousands of old items as new
• Too many visits by the "Bloglines plumber" (outages)

Along with the impressively frequent "Loading..." and "There appears to be a server communication problem..." dialogs, the long-running beta of Bloglines sported a lean, mean new home page this morning.

I know installing and renewing SSL security certificates can be tedious and time-consuming; however, if you force your beta project traffic through an SSL connection you pretty much have to consider the certificate at or near Job 1.

I can still use "classic" Bloglines, which has no SSL requirement, but seems to sport many of the same reliability problems as the beta. Anyone have an RSS aggregator/reader suite you just love?

Bloglines, long my RSS reader of choice, should either just adopt its long-running "new" beta service as its main production service, or fix up the "old" service it still offers as its default.

The default Bloglines service seems increasingly buggy. Case in point: When trying to move feeds around among my folders today, I got thrown into some kind of error loop involving the Ajax implementation. This kind of thing happens way too often.

News alerts that lit up pixels on my screen the past two days got me thinking:

• CNN.com sent a breaking news email just after 10 p.m. Eastern last night: "Barack Obama tells packed stadium he accepts Democratic nomination 'with profound gratitude and great humility.'" His nomination long ago secured, this speech was a media-friendly event planned for many weeks; I can think of no urgent need to know he accepted the nomination in it. (All such CNN alerts carry the same subject line -- "CNN Breaking News" -- which seems silly but may, in fact, be a clever ruse. I would not have opened the message if the subject line clued me in on its content.)