I’m also changing feed readers.  I give up on Bloglines.

Listen, I really really wanted to like Bloglines and used it for years.  Today was the last straw: I realized it was not picking up this very blog.  That seems inexcusable.  This is a very basic wordpress blog.  WordPress is only the world’s most complete and widely-used blogging software.  What more do you need from me, Bloglines?  I have endorsed you.  I have supported you.  I have told classrooms full of open minded college students to start using Bloglines.  No more.

The problems:

• Constantly dropping feeds.  I notice a blog hasn’t updated in weeks.  I check the site.  They’ve updated, all right.  Bloglines just didn’t bother to let me know.  This is the basic duty of a feed reader, right?
• Frequent unresponsiveness.  I click a feed, I wait and wait, and then it’s done loading with nothing to show for it.  Sometimes when I re-click, I see items.  Sometimes, they’re gone.  Thanks, Bloglines!
• Bizarre errors.  I always get the thing where I log in and every one of my feeds has 9,999 “new” items.
• Can’t see LiveJournal feeds.  (Well, who can blame them?  And anyway, I want to follow like maybe two feeds in there.  But still.  No excuse.)
• Utter lack of technical support.  I wrote them probably a dozen times to ask about the problems.  Never got a single response.

Honestly, I would’ve bailed on Bloglines a long time ago except that I didn’t want to adopt Google Reader and rely on Google for yet another vital web service.  But Google Reader has shown me none of these problems.  (Yet.)  I’m open to other feed readers, totally.

End: complaining about a free web service that has largely benefited me for several years.