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...on Bloglines.

Something bothersome has been happening to Bloglines—the on-line Blog aggregator I have been using for more than three years.

It has to do with the left-nav pane, where my subscriptions are listed and ones with new posts are shown in boldface with the number of new posts displayed in parentheses, much like in any standard email client. As I work through the blogs by clicking on each subscription, the posts would show up on the right pane, and the boldness would go away. Again, like in typical email clients.

In the old days. The left-nav pane would refresh itself every so often, with updated information reflecting any new posts made since the last refresh or my last interaction, whichever is more recent. During the, maybe, 200 microseconds of the refreshing, I simply can't click on the left-nav pane.

Some time during 2006, Blogline introduced AJaX to the left-nav pane. Instead of refreshing itself, the left-nav pane automatically updates itself with information that it apparently has gotten from the Blogline home asynchronously.

This, by itself, is a good thing. It reduces the server load on Bloglines. And it also reduces the overall internet bandwidth usage.

Except when it clashes with me, the user, clicking on a subscription, which is a daily occurrence. And it goes like this:

I saw a subscription with new posts:

Weiqi Gao's Observations (3)

I click on it. The new posts show up on the right pane. But, instead of seeing the subscription turn to:

Weiqi Gao's Observations

The line flickers a bit and returns to the pre-click state of:

Weiqi Gao's Observations (3)

Apparently an AJaX packet arrived right after I clicked on the subscription. And it tells the left-nav pane that there are 3 new posts in the subscription.

Now the left-nav pane, contains wrong information. If I was in one of my rapid scan mode, the wrong false positive new post information could occur for a dozen subscriptions.

I'd rather not have wrong information displayed.

This is not something that would drive me to another service provider. And I know it is not good form to gripe about a fantastic free service. But I simply cannot hold it in me any longer.

The problem should not be hard to fix: simply discard any asynchronous updates if I have interacted with the left-nav pane within the last two (or one or three) seconds. I hope someone at Bloglines is listening.