Bloglines crashed sometime early this morning. (don’t ask me why I was checking my aggregator at 3am) I tried to view my subscriptions, and the list was empty. I tried to export my subscriptions, and the process hung about half way down my list. At which point I started to hyperventilate, just a little. After all hours and hours have gone into accumulating, and organizing my daily information diet, the idea of recreating that blend if not from scratch, then from a several month old export was alarming. (and I was sleep deprived and not being very rationale).

Pretty weird thing to be impressed by, huh? Three distinct aspects of Mark’s handling of it just floor me, and make me wonder why every organization can’t be like this.

  1. Transparency. When I logged back on this morning, I knew exactly what the problem was. I had a response to my support ticket, there was an update posted to Bloglines News, and there was an entry on Winged Pig, Mark’s blog. Database corruption, possibly due to filesystem problems. That is something I can relate to, I’ve been there, and I know that the problem is no worse, and no less. Transparency is huge. I’m not sure I ever want to use a product from a company/group that doesn’t have a blog ever again.
  2. Backups. Hourly snapshots. More the one has any right to except from a free service, but very comforting.
  3. Monitoring. Okay, the monitoring failed, but I doubt it will next time, and again it shows a deep understanding of what is needed to run a quality service.

And I’m exporting my subscription list right now, which I can do, because there is no attempt to trap me into the service. (unfortunately only in the horribly underspecified OPML format, which means it isn’t actually compatible with other “OPML” aware aggregators. But it gives me enough to work with.