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On Bloglines security: Preview Feed is evil also
15.05.05 | filed in Tools, e
Reading Darren's posting "Warning about Checking G-Mail RSS on Bloglines" I was reminded of something I wanted to post: The problem with bloglines and feeds.
As many of my blogs have different feeds, I am in constant struggle to get them straight out a) which feeds appear to be subscrible in bloglines, b) how to tell bloglines to stop fetching and which feed to turn over completly instead.
For example do I have subscribers to the technorati search for my name where I am fairly sure they wanted the blog instead - but technorati was the first in the list available. But there is more. Another example is, that I would like to 'switch' one of my podcastfeeds to the new feed. But I can't, because then bloglines would take that feed and offer it to be the first in the list. Which is not what I want, because people should not subscribe to that feed, but the correct feed.
While testing out feeds with the Preview function for a friend (to see if the html code works on his site), he told me later that one feed was requested by several other rss engines and probably some spammers too. I did never subscribe to that feed, just made a preview of it - and that feed was never ever published anywhere.
As it seems, bloglines does assign an id to the feed and special search engines do grab all of the available feednumbers (whether they are private or not) and eat them.
So every instruction "how to subscribe to private feeds and keep them private" is bogus, because there is nothing as private feeds in bloglines.
While this is a security issues, I think bloglines is only 2/3 to blame - the concept of them is to fetch ones and distribute many times.
And now comes 100% of the problem at top of my posting: How the hell to tell bloglines to get rid of a feed if this does not even work when you have normal feeds?
Another good post on this topic is "Do not use the Atom Gmail service with online aggregators like Bloglines" which explains in more detail the Gmail aspect of this.
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