BlogLines Death Watch
Rogers Cadenhead notes that BlogLines seems to be slipping beneath the waves:
Some people are getting the error "Port 80 says: Bad Gateway ... proxy server received invalid response from upstream server," which suggests that there's a load-balancing problem with the site. The Next Web reported in October that the owner of Bloglines, Ask.Com, tried unsuccessfully to sell the site and has outsourced the operation to China. An unofficial Twitter account, bloglines, has been tracking the site for a while and claims that it's now being run strictly "in maintenance mode."
This is the one large drawback to online services: if they vaporize for any reason, you can be completely dead in the water. Client side apps may not be perfect, but at least you have something to ponder :) Ultimately, I think the RIA (Rich Internet App) is the proper blend, because you have a client side cache of your stuff, even if the service dies. Kind of the best of both worlds...
Comments
[@Bloglines (Unofficiall Bloglines twitter account)] May 9, 2009 15:43:44.000
@Bloglines Someone from Ask.com is online and endeavouring to contact someone that can do something about the outage.
[] May 12, 2009 7:16:29.516
They've just added new features. Anonymous, unsubstantiated rumours are not news.
Bloglines exports all your data in standard OPML format, so you can save it and import it into other tools whenever you wish.
Umm
[ anonymous] May 12, 2009 9:58:36.335
Comment by anonymous
Long periods of time where the service times out - no "being updated" message, no 500, no nothing: that's what prompts "Death Watch" posts. You want to not see those? Then make sure you have a filler page up when you do updates :)