Google Reader Hates Me

Yesterday at work, I was playing around with my Google Reader to ensure that an RSS feed for a client’s blog would work properly, and I somehow succeeded in completely borking my news reader of choice.


Observe as I attempt to read through my feeds:
Google Reader Error: 1
First I try to view new items in my list. Lovely. An error message reading: “Sorry, an unexpected condition has occurred which is preventing Google Reader from fulfilling the request.”

Google Reader Error: 2
Let’s see if I can pinpoint the problem and just remove the faulty RSS feeds. Here are the feeds I added at work yesterday. Sure enough, it looks like they weren’t valid. I’ve got “(title unknown)” for the subscription names, and what looks like incorrect URLs for the feed paths. Well, let’s just click “Unsubscribe”…

Google Reader Error: 3
Yep. I’m sure that I want to get back to reading my countless RSS feeds all together instead of one-by-one by source (which, if you think about it, is more or less the same as browsing to the website itself…)

Google Reader Error: 4
I’m waiting with bated breath.

Google Reader Error: 1
Huh. That looks familiar.
So, apparently I can’t remove these badly formatted feeds from my list, and until I do, it appears that the Google Reader home is completely fubar.
Bloglines is looking more and more attractive. I’m a little too mobile to rely on built-in Firefox or Safari options, and I’m a fan of multitasking programs (i.e., not IE… I want my web browser to handle all web content, and I want it accessible at work, at home, in the airport, in the Town Commons while I sip an iced coffee and watch the hula-hoopers, etc.). The idea of a separate utility for reading aggregated web content always seemed a bit of a cop-out, and since more and more of my life is getting 0wnz0red by GOOG (plus it’s nice having it easily accessible from my homepage), I went with the Reader. Now I’m starting to wonder if the honeymoon period might be over.
Anyone else have a good web-based news aggregator they’d like to recommend?


Comments

9 responses to “Google Reader Hates Me”

  1. Hi, Michael. My name’s Chris and I’m a Google engineer for Google Reader and want to see if I can make a house call. Could you let me know where your client’s feed is and I’ll do my best to diagnose (and if possible, fix) the issue.

  2. Hey, Chris. Wow. I must say, I’m impressed by the quick response here. The two feeds that seem to be causing problems are smithmountainlakenews.com/atom.xml and http://www.smithmountainlakenews.com/atom.xml. The actual feed itself is valid (it’s a typical TypePad atom feed) but perhaps the way the paths were typed into Reader caused problems?
    Anyway, thanks for offering to help. I really appreciate it.

  3. Ok, I might’ve fixed this. Could you try logging in again? It looks like “http://” was missing from the feed URL during subscription. We definitely could do better in validating input so I’ll follow-up with a more general bug fix to prevent this from happening to others.

  4. Hmm. Still getting the same errors. I can view feeds fine from within the subscriptions list. It’s only when I view my reading list that I get the error. Same in both Firefox 1.5.0.2 and IE 6.
    The faulty feeds are gone from the list. I tried to clear out the feeds and reimport, but no dice.

  5. Ah, I think that’s because placeholder items for each new subscription from the Smith Mountain Lake feeds are still in the reading list. Do I have your permission to remove these?

  6. Ok, just moved those markers to your read items. Viewing your read items will throw the same errors but your reading list should be clear. Soon I’ll remove the markers entirely – sorry for the delay…and the bug. 🙂

  7. It’s working great. Thanks again, Chris. I’m definitely sticking with Reader.

  8. Just removed the markers from your read items. Hopefully that makes things better. Let me know here if there’s still a problem and I’ll try and get time to look at it further.

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