Ok. So I thought I might address some of the many pending questions that have featured via emails, the Help Desk, forums and such to give you all some understanding as to the problems that Blotanical has faced with this issue.

There are x variables that could have caused the problem and I have been systematically calculating each one as to whether they were responsible. They are;

1. Feedburner - While this is a state of the art application, and still the preferred option for cleaning and publishing feeds, the publishers decided that it would now block aggregators from accessing their feeds. Why? I'm not sure but in their wisdom they have decided that this is a good thing.

   Therefore, aggregators such as our Picks list, have had to adjust our code to "pretend" that we are a browser picking up the feed rather than an aggregator. Needless to say, it's been a fairly worthless exercise on Google's behalf, and one that's caused a fair amount of angst amongst the online community.

2. My own code - this is always a possibility as I'm only human and as we all know human's make mistakes. However, in this case the problems occurred without any intervention on my behalf. The code has remained unchanged for the past few months and even though some have thought that it may be related to the Blotanical Awards I can assure you their code sets have nothing to do with each other. It was mere coincidence.


3. cURL and SimplePie - for many blotanists you can just switch off now or scoot down the page for solutions. But for those who are interested, the code we use to pick up your feeds utilises the SimplePie and cURL libraries. While I did initially assume that they were at fault, after much testing and discussion with their 'gurus' they have to be ruled out as possibilities.


4. My hosting service - the final option in this mess is my hosting service. After all the testing that went on it seems that the problem may actually fall in their laps. As they haven't gotten back to me with a response within the last 24 hours (they're usually very good at sorting out problems) my confidence that this is the case is growing. My guess is that they have made some changes within their structures that block certain applications and Feedburner is one such application.

So, where to from here?

I see that some of you have had enough with Google products, abandoning Blogger and Feedburner and relying on Wordpress instead. While this may be a short term fix, it may produce other problems in the long term and doesn't insulate you completely from further issues. Having said that, if I were to start blogging now I would certainly opt for Wordpress over Google products. But then again I use Movable Type which I think is far superior but is still suffering from a few issues itself at the moment.

For those with Feedburner feeds and Blogger blogs, I have included an alternate url that picks up your default blogspot feed. In most cases this seems to be working well but some are still producing errors for which I cannot correct.

Those who have Feedburner feeds but don't have a Blogger blog, I suggest that you comment below or email me and I shall update you with an alternate feed as well - where possible - until this mess is sorted out.

I truly apologise to those who have been pulling their hair out because of these issues. I am fully committed to fixing these problems and hopefully we can get through this as quickly as possible. Thank you for your patience.