Tech Note: Google Feedburner Fail
Recently, Google bought Feedburner, the popular RSS hosting service, and it must be said: so far, they are doing an absolutely rotten job of managing it.
I’ve had nothing but trouble since the changeover, with feeds that won’t update, feeds with changed URLs but no notice, and worst of all, feed descriptions full of garbage HTML that’s obviously being inserted by the Google/Feedburner monstrosity. Not to mention being unable to log in to the feed management page, either with my Google ID or my Feedburner account. And good luck getting any support from Google; they’ve made it almost impossible to find a way to contact them.
For many sites, the popout excerpts in our left sidebar have become pretty unreadable because of the HTML problem described above. I’ve put in some custom code to solve some of the problems, but there are still a lot of feeds with crud in their excerpts—and we all know how painful that can be.
Please, Google — put things back the way they were. You’ve broken something that didn’t need fixing.
Frank says: