intertwingly

The Bloglines Team: As we continue to develop new features, small and large, we also make necessary improvements to existing systems. Expanding our support for the Atom 1.0 syndication standard is the latest of these. You may notice duplicate posts coming from atom feeds as we make the switch from the old to the new atom parser. But have no fear, these duplicates will fade away and soon be a distant memory.

Attention weblog shoppers: It is now safe to talk about markup in weblogs!  I can now say things like <xmp> and &#xe9; without Bloglines getting confused.  Hooray!

This is important to me as quite a few of my readers see my posts through the filter that is Bloglines.  Thanks!

Based on a quick sampling, it appears that relative URI references are also handled correctly.  Kudos!

Now the true test of a product isn’t how perfect it is — after all, nothing ever quite meets that standard — but how responsive the team is to bug reports and feature requests.  Given that there is a brand spanking new Atom parser in Bloglines, hopefully the knowledge of how it is constructed is still fresh, and the following requests should be easy:

• Bloglines seems to be missing the <link> elements in my Atom feed.  My current theory is that the new Atom parser doesn’t realize that the value of the type attribute defaults to alternate, and attempts to fall back to the atom:id when no alternate link is found.
• While markup in content is now safe, it appears that markup in titles is still an issue.  Phil created a few tests that you might find helpful.  For the benefit of those that believe that this is a rare and isolated issue that only affects a few markup geeks, I will note that the current bloglines feed is not well formed XML and therefore will not be processed by RSSBandit, IE7, or the the Windows RSS Platform.
• I’d like to see a third option for the Updated Items preference: only display the item as new if the value of atom:updated changed.  Bloggers like Tim Bray use this to distinguish typo corrections from significant updates.  In fact, I would argue that this would make a good default for Bloglines as it would generally prevent the user from seeing “imagined” duplicates as the parser improves over time.

While there may be bugs in other corner cases, these are the ones that I see as most likely to affect readers of my weblog.

Thank you for the upgrade, and thanks in advance for your consideration of these requests.