Monday, September 25, 2006

Stupid Blogger/Blogspot

Blogger/Blogspot has now reached the limit regarding being stupid and non-professional. As many of you know, shifting to blogger beta has been a nightmare for most of the bloggers. If you don't know read my old posts here, here and here and also go and checkout google's blogger help group at google groups.
I am writing this post because today they did another stupid mistake. They disabled the old feeds url http://sandy007smarty.blogspot.com/atom.xml and instead started feeds on this new url: http://sandy007smarty.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/full for everyone(atleast all beta users). But before doing this or even after doing this they should have sent a mail notifying us of this, which they didn't. In fact, ideally, they should give us an option whether we want to shift our url or not. Because many people might have subscribed to the old feed and would have no way to know what happened to the old feed. They should additionally display a message at the old feed saying that it has been moved to a new url.
I got to know only when I saw that my new post was not coming on smr's blogroll. Instead my old post was being displayed there.
So, moral of the story, blogger sucks. I think I should move on to wordpress.

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Monday, September 11, 2006

Why is my blog always on top in IIIT Blogroll ?

There is some problem with my feed since I shifted to blogger beta. The blogger beta atom feed was not getting correctly parsed by SMR's IIIT Blogroll. It seems MagpieRSS (the software used by blogroll to parse feeds) is not comfortable with the newer versions of Atom Feeds. So I decided to shift to RSS feed. But Blogger would allow RSS feeds only to paid customers. So I created an account at http://www.feedburner.com/ which takes my atom feed provided by blogger as input and publishes an RSS Feed. And I asked blogroll to subscribe to this feed.
Now my blog feed started getting parsed, but time is not correct. Blogger publishes the time in this format 2006-09-11T01:26:52.069+05:30 , i.e GMT +05:30. Now feedburner keeps the same time but changes to 05:30 to -05:00 . So a blog written at 1:26:52 +5:30 becomes 1:26:52 -5:00.
Now blogroll rightly adds 10:30 minutes to this time to get the IST time which becomes 11:56:52am.
So my blog comes to top and remains there atleast till 11:56am.
The problem is with feedburner(changes +0530 to -0500). Any solutions ??

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