The Blame Game
- 5
- Add a Comment
Okay, bLaugh is up and running - including a great gag on the Friendster patent today. I’ve been using FeedBurner to manage the feed, which has (for the most part) been a good experience. To make bLaugh fully PSP compatible, I had to create enclosures for the comic images - which can only be done with a direct hyperlink to the image itself. In doing so, some of my non-Friendster friends are telling me that two images are showing up in each bLaugh feed item. The reasons are simple: (a) the news aggregator is ignoring the HTML I’ve set to hide the image link from plain view; (b) the news aggregator is rendering the enclosure inline for your convenience, as well as the image that’s pulling in directly via the IMG tag. So is anybody really to blame here? Wish I knew. FeedBurner has allowed me to infuse the Flickr images tagged “bLaugh” with my regular ol’ blog feed - allowing my tens of thousands of subscribers to get the day’s gag without having to subscribe to the separate bLaugh feed. Still, others are saying that my feed in Bloglines is giving them fits. Argh! Can I just blame the dog?!
5 Comments
Comic Strip Blogger
July 11th, 2006
at 1:45pm
you can blame me! (i.e. CSB)
besides: just do dynamic delivery of various types of feeds depending on the RSS reader signature.
Rick Klau
July 11th, 2006
at 2:50pm
The blame’s ours. There’s some details here on what happened; the short answer is that a software deploy last night at 3am introduced a bug that we found at 7am and fixed around 8. The bug resulted in the clickthrough URLs being modified, which would have caused aggregators that polled the feed in the affected window to see the items as new.
The good news (!) is that this isn’t a result of the enclosure hack or the flickr integration, so both can continue as is. (As for aggregators ignoring the HTML, nothing I can do there.)
Needless to say we’re really sorry about this, both for our publishers who use the service as well as for the subscribers who were affected. We’re looking at our deployment processes to ensure that we catch this stuff beforehand.
Thanks for using FeedBurner, and thanks for raising the issue!
–Rick
VP, Business Development
FeedBurner
tins ::: Rick Klau’s weblog » Great feedback
July 11th, 2006
at 3:38pm
[...] Own up to mistakes. Chris Pirillo caught a bug (first!) of ours this morning, wasn’t sure who to blame, and I made sure in the comments it was clear that it was our issue. I don’t like making mistakes any more than the next guy. But I want every publisher to know that we’ll never hide from a mistake, and where we can, we’ll engage and address the issue as quickly as possible to do right by them. [...]
Drew Olanoff
July 11th, 2006
at 4:57pm
I live and die by Feedburner, and they’re always on top of stuff like this. bLaugh is freaking awesome man.
Danny Pryor
June 23rd, 2007
at 5:24pm
New site for all the AOL stuff we don’t like … just starting out and found you on the searches … ideas? I like what you’re writing.