Steve Ely

Delicious RSS feeds

I mentioned earlier I’ve been encountering some unresponsiveness from Del.icio.us customer support with resolving some broken RSS feeds.  It seems worth clarifying the details with that.  As I noted, I bookmark stuff with it constantly and have thousands of items there now.   I’ve long had people in my Del.icio.us network, which is essentially a kind of internal reader of feeds from selected users, as it sorts chronologically all of their new bookmarks, but I’ve never had any need to subscribe to a Del.icio.us feed otherwise.   Recently, though, I wanted to use a WordPress RSS widget on another blog and found that somehow it wasn’t recognizing as a valid feed either http://del.icio.us/rss/steve.ely or http://feeds.delicious.com/rss/steve.ely.  I’d seen the widget work fine for John Scalzi, so I tried http://del.icio.us/rss/jscalzi and found that it worked just fine.  Confounded, I began trying others.   A few worked, while others didn’t.

To confirm it wasn’t a problem with WordPress, I tried subscribing with Bloglines, which has been my primary RSS reader for a while.  It worked for Scalzi’s and a couple others, but, again, didn’t work for mine or some others.   Since I’ve been getting little or no support from Del.icio.us on this, I did a little more testing on it.  Not that I was likely to fix the problem myself, but I wanted to at least have more data, I guess, in case they do want to do something with it.

Bloglines is pretty inconvenient for this, though, I decided, so started testing with Google Reader.  Specifically, I checked the operability of the RSS feed for those Del.icio.us accounts in my network.  I currently have 32 in the network.  (Scalzi’s not among them.)  It turns out that
http://del.icio.us/rss/username doesn’t work for 28 of them.  For four of them, Google Reader was able to recognize and subscribe to the feed.  For the others, it said something like
“No feed available for ‘http://del.icio.us/rss/UIClibrarian.’”  28 users out of 32!  I haven’t any idea if the proportions would hold up outside of my network, but if so, that’d be broken feeds for seven eighths of all users.  Ridiculous.

The good news is I seem to have found a good workaround.  (It’s still bad news that something that should work on its own is broken.)  Some Del.icio.us users in my network I know about because they’re my friends in real life, but some I just discovered by clicking around, looking at who bookmarks similar stuff as me in a similar way or who shares with me overlapping network or fans.

One of the latter sorts is the mysteriously named MissElliot1978, who I just noticed today has made clear her real name, Bonnie J. M. Swoger, with a link to her web site.   Apparently, she’s a librarian at SUNY Geneseo, and at first I was just sort of appropriately impressed with her web page.  After a minute, though, something dawned on me.  Hers (http://del.icio.us/rss/MissElliot1978) is among the RSS feeds Google Reader wasn’t recognizing for some reason, and yet content from her bookmarks was showing up fine on her own web site, via Feedburner.   Intrigued, I created a Feedburner account and pointed it toward  http://del.icio.us/steve.ely, and it generated and RSS feed for me at http://feeds.feedburner.com/Delicious/steveely, which Google Reader and the WordPress widget seem to cope with just fine.  What makes it odd is that Feedburner knows the original feed is http://del.icio.us/rss/steve.ely.   If the original is no good, why is that not an obstacle for Feedburner?  If it is OK, why did Bloglines, Google Reader, and WordPress have such a problem with it?

Either way, I’m not happy that those Del.icio.us RSS feeds aren’t working on their own, but I am glad to have achieved the intended effect.  Now if I can just get Ms. Swoger to explain how she’s managed to combine items from multiple sources into one Feedburner feed.

Update: Two excellent developments.  Bonnie Swoger promptly replied to my inquiry and explained that it’s a service called feed.informer.com that allows for the combining of feeds.  So that’s pretty great.  Second, Britta, the Delicious community manager intern, apparently is keeping a close eye on blog posts about Delicious and, as you might notice, commented on this post and the preceding one, reaching out to ensure the issue is well-resolved.  So that’s quite well done by her and hopefully the beginning of a fruitful dialog.