Goodbye, Bloglines

I just finished migrating all my salvageable data from Bloglines, which will close down as of October 1st, 2010.

They provided a good service at first, but they managed to screw up a significant amount of my data.

  • If I saved a clipping of any Planet-based feed, they replaced it with some random entry from the same feed.
  • Same for any clipping from Bruce Schneier's weblog and a few others.

Hundreds of clippings gone. And getting those clippings out was painful. They provided no automated way, no API, and going through each clipping took so long, with so much typing and clicking, that I had to essentially declare "clipping bankruptcy." All those interesting and informative weblog entries will never get echoed and amplified here.

My new feed reader is now fully under my control: Tiny Tiny RSS (aka TT-Rss), an open source project. Installation went smoothly (even though this is the first sizeable PHP app I have installed), data is backed up on my schedule and under my control, and the interface works more smoothly than Bloglines'.

Here's to useful reading and informative discussion.


Written by Andrew Ittner in misc on Sat 18 September 2010. Tags: commentary, web