In today’s Buffalo News. “I like the convenience of Bloglines because you can log on from home, office or anywhere to check the headlines on the free account that you set up online. It takes five minutes or less to register, then you go hunting for all of the RSS feeds you see fit to aggregate.”

A popular request of Bloglines has been for a version for connected PDAs. This evening we rolled out a version of Bloglines specifically tailored to PDAs. The pages are simpler and contain less graphics. Not as pretty or feature rich as the standard Bloglines web site, but functional on small devices. It’s incredibly cool that I can now view my subscriptions on my Treo 600 while I’m away from the computer.

Tim Bray in a post asks aggregator developers to be picky about their support for Atom feeds. He specifically calls on the developers of a couple of ‘popular aggregators’ to enforce correctness when parsing Atom feeds. And it looks like those developers plan on doing just that. He doesn’t mention Bloglines, even though I’m pretty sure we have more users than the other aggregators mentioned. No big deal on that; we haven’t announced any user numbers yet. This whole debate is so clear to me, I hesitate to even label it a debate. For the record, Bloglines will always try to parse as much as possible from a feed, regardless of whether it’s well formed or not. That’s what we already do right now with our support of all the major versions of RSS and Atom. In fact, the parser is so liberal, you can mix the different formats in a feed, and it gets things right anyways (I’m not recommending anyone do this, however). It’s all about the users. I never want a user to have the experience where they cannot subscribe to a feed. If that makes our lives as developers more difficult, well, suck it up. We’re developers; we do the hard work so users won’t have to. Speaking personally as someone who has written a web browser, I know that non-conformance to standards can lead to more development effort. But it’s the right thing to do. So, if other aggregator developers want to try to enforce strict compliance with a spec, more power to them. But let me repeat our mantra: It’s all about the users. If a user wants to subscribe to a feed, we’re going to do everything we can to support that feed.

Today I had the second half of my private pilot checkride. I had the first part on Tuesday, but we couldn’t complete the flying portion because I didn’t like the weather. Today the weather was much better, and I got it done. About 5 hours total between the two days, including 2.3 hours flying time. I stressed out over it, and ended up pushing a lot of Bloglines stuff to the side in order to study for it over the past few weeks. But it’s all done now. I wasn’t perfect, but I performed well enough to pass. We took off from Palo Alto, and flew over to Livermore, where I did my airwork. We then did an engine failure scenario, a diversion to a different airport, and finally ended up at Byron, where I did several take offs and landings. I now have a Private Pilot certificate, Airplane, Single Engine Land, with a tailwheel endorsement.

I haven’t had a chance to point to many of the great comments people are making about Bloglines lately. I have a saved search set up that tracks when people mention Bloglines, so I’m able to easily stay current with the buzz, and I do appreciate all the nice things people have been saying. I really liked one particular phrase from this About.com article, which is the title of this post. Anyways, a big thank you to everyone who uses Bloglines. We’ve got big things planned for 2004. Stay tuned, keep spreading the word, and keep sending us suggestions for how we can improve the service!