Bloglet is a neat little XML-RPC service that parses RSS feeds and sends them via e-mail to subscribers. (If that sentence doesn’t make any sense to you, read below.) But in the past month it appears to have choked – the website is dead (I tried repeatedly to connect to it last night and this morning) and the weblog of Bloglet’s creator, Monsur Hossain, hasn’t been updated in almost a month (after near-daily updates for more than a year).
A bit more detail: many weblogs publish an XML version of their blog (you can see my “feed” here). This is primarily for XML readers (known as aggregators) – programs that periodically check the XML file for new content. If they see new content, they download it to the user’s PC so they can see what’s new at various weblogs and websites. Bloglet offered you a different option. Monsur recognized that many weblog readers don’t own an aggregator – and could instead “subscribe” to a weblog by simply providing their e-mail address. Bloglet would then check the weblog’s RSS feed on their behalf, and when new content was found it would e-mail what it found to the subscribers.
I set this service up on my blog focused on the Dean campaign, and had 30 or so people sign up in the first couple months. But updates appear to have stopped sometime around the beginning of the month – and now I can’t find any information about whether it died completely. From Google’s cache comes this post from mid-April:
Bloglet emails have been experiencing some problems as of late. I apologize to those of you who aren’t receiving updates right now.
Upon initial inspection, it looks like Bloglet just has too many sites to process in a day! I built Bloglet with scalability in mind, but XML-RPC calls to remote servers is an inherently slow operation, and it looks like Bloglet is outgrowing its implementation. I’m going to investigate some solutions over the weekend, and hopefully I’ll have more information (as well as a fix!) for you on Monday. Thanks for your patience!
In other news, Bloglet will also be moving to a new, more powerful server on Monday.
If anyone has any info about this, I’d love to hear from you.
Yep, I had 2 sites using Bloglet and both started screwing up about 2 months ago. No response to any of my questions over the whole time period.
ReplyDeleteI ended up installing a PHP script on my site to handle subscriptions. Much, much better.
Bloglet Kaput?
ReplyDeleteRick Klau writes about the state of Bloglet, that fantastic resource that will email the content from weblogs every morning.Yup, the site hasn't been updated in about a month, butI have still been recieving my morning e-mail from Bloglet. It doesn't wo...
Web, E-mail, and Usenet Integration (or Lack Thereof)
ReplyDeleteBy Erik J. Heels (info@heels.com) First published 5/31/2003; Heels(dot)com Web Site; Law Offices of Erik J. Heels Rick Klau notes that Bloglet, a thrird-party RSS-to-e-mail service, appears to be dead (http://www.rklau.com/tins/001909.html). This illu...
I emailed Monsur a couple of times because special characters (like the German "Umlaute" that I use) were not showing up in the emails, but he has not replied in the last weeks which is pretty unusual for him.
ReplyDeleteSince about two months the service has been very unreliable. Do you know some alternatives?
I started my blawg about 6 or 7 weeks ago and tried to you bloglet. I could never get it to work and removed the code from my site. Then suddenly a couple of days ago, I started get the emails from it. So I don't know what to think. I too could never get them to respond.
ReplyDeleteWeb, E-mail, and Usenet Integration (or Lack Thereof)
ReplyDeleteBy Erik J. Heels (info@heels.com) First published 5/31/2003; Heels(dot)com Web Site; Law Offices of Erik J. Heels Rick Klau notes that Bloglet, a thrird-party RSS-to-e-mail service, appears to be dead (http://www.rklau.com/tins/001909.html). This illu...
I have had problems with bloglet too. In my case, when a user tries to subscribe from my page, all they get is an error 500 (Internal Server Error) from bloglet. I guess I will be looking for another solution than to continue to wait for a response too.
ReplyDeleteGoing into September now and still having problems logging into my signin page. I only
ReplyDeleteget page cannot be displayed. No response on
emails sent to monsur. Too bad this was a nice concept. I don't know of any good alternatives like it.