I held off on transferring my feeds to FeedBurner, but was eventually convinced that it was going to help more than hurt.

Today, I’m strongly considering taking my feeds back – out of the hands of FeedBurner / Google. I’m definitely not the only one who is discontent with FeedBurner’s service. There have been several reports of problems, but very little reassurance that FeedBurner has stayed true to the users that helped build the service.

I noticed the other day that when I was the fifth blogger to write about the TechCrunch tablet, my post did not show up in TechMeme. Odd. I know I’m in the list, and I know I sourced the original post and wrote plenty about the topic.

Turns out, my freakin’ FeedBurnered feed isn’t rendering much more than the first two sentences of any given post – without links. I knew something had been off for a while, but didn’t realize the problem was THAT bad. For some reason unknown to FeedBurner engineers, items that used to show full content are no longer showing full content to some aggregators.

Unacceptable.

Their response? I’m “SOL” (their term, not mine):

This is an issue of the particular browsers choosing to render the description element in their display instead of the content element. I think he’s SOL. In fact, I see the same artifact in both his source feed and FB feed in Firefox. If you force the system to do server-site browser-friendly rendering… you see full content.

So, is it my source feed that’s causing problems, or the FeedBurner feed?

chris.pirillo.com/feed/ – Source

feeds.pirillo.com/ChrisPirillo – FeedBurner

Do you see any difference between those two feeds in your aggregator / browser? I know this post won’t show up on TechMeme, either – so there’s little chance other FeedBurner users will see…

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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?!

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