Bloglines now offers a way to claim your blogs. Ordinarily, I never bother to do stuff like this. But Bloglines has at least three versions of my blog in their catalog. I would like to consolidate these into a single entry, something Bloglines claims I can do if I register my blog.
The registration process is somewhat annoying, but I can see why it is necessary. In short, I must add a Bloglines-given identifier to my blog’s HTML template. Then I must add another Bloglines-given identifier to a blog post. These allow Bloglines to verify that the blog’s website and feed are both under my control.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
Update: I was able to claim my blog but not its outdated entries in Bloglines’s catalog. Neither Bloglines’s instructions nor error reporting is specific enough for me to figure out what is wrong. I’m giving up for now.
Update 2 (2006-07-15): I was able to claim one of the outdated entries that had caused Bloglines to choke before. The other entries, however, are still problematic. Bloglines does have more-descriptive error reporting now, but those reports do not inspire confidence:
Verification Failed:
An Unidentified Error occured [sic] while talking to (null) or http://blog.moertel.com/xml/rss/feed.xml?snip=start.
Capitalizing “Unidentified Error” is a nice touch: it makes the error seem both mysterious and important.
Update 3 (2006-07-20): All of my feeds on Bloglines are now consolidated under a single entry. What’s the secret? Ruthless URL canonicalization. I perused my logs and found all of the various URLs that Bloglines was using to access my feed. Then I configured my front-end proxy server to redirect (401 permanent) all of them to my preferred feed URL. After a week or so, Bloglines’s software took the hint and consolidated the entries.