What we have here is a failure of redundancy

I think it was scheduled maintenance or announced-in-advance downtime (or maybe it was just deja vu when I saw it), but Bloglines was offline for a while over the New Year’s weekend. I might never have known as I wasn’t online much but Monday night I fired up my trusty new feed reader,Netnewswire, and got nothing. Hmm, me thinks. It was especially weird because I hadn’t checked any of the 80 or so feeds I usually read with Netnewswire in several days. Could it be that everyone — even the most prolific of blogsters, Jalopnik — had taken the weekend off. That was when I fired up a browswer and went to Bloglines. Down. Server crashed. Nada. Bummer.

But hey, I think, this is the Internet. Every feed is hosted somewhere else, not at Bloglines. Just point Netnewswire to the actual feed locations. How did things get so interdependent in the first place you ask? See, owing to a desire to synch everything in my digital life up with everything and have access to everything everywhere, I had coordinated Netnewswire with Bloglines which meant the offline reader was getting all the feed postings from online at Bloglines.

Ok, so I have my old feed reader, Shrook, still around but its list of feeds is way out of date. No problem. I’ll just export all my feeds from NNW and import them into Shrook, right? I try a couple of times and all I get into Shrook is one lousy feed. What’s up? I examine the exported code. The rest simply aren’t there. Oy – turns out that using the special Bloglines synch feature means that NNW only keeps track of a special Bloglines address for each feed, not the actual, underlying feed address. The one single feed that is exporting is one that I forgot to switch to the Bloglines synch. Turns out I’ve created an extreme dependency on Bloglines. But more mucking about shows that NNW does have the web page address for the home of each feed under the info listing. So it becomes a pretty simple (if somewhat tedious) task to go to all the web sites, get the proper RSS address and load it into Shrook (note to bloggers – please put the RSS link somewhere obvious. I was amazed at how hard to find some were.)

Of course, the actual lesson of all this is quite simple — every time I add a feed to my master list at Bloglines, export the list FROM BLOGLINES and save it someplace safe. Back up. Always back up. Duh.