crankygeek

One of the customers in the Bradbury Software forums mentioned that his company’s proxy filtering is blocking anything coming from FeedBurner.

Background: FeedBurner is a feed processing service that does a few pretty cool things for it’s customers. One, they’ll publish your feed files for you, saving your bandwidth. Additonally, though, they also provide statistics. These are things that any blogger or other feed might want to take advantage of, regardless of their content type. If you publish your feed through their service, your RSS/Atom/WhateverFormat feed link will look something like this:
http://www.feedburner.com/NameOfYourFeed.

I thought I’d share my reply since it seemed “bloggish” when I finished.

I ran into a similar problem with my previous employer. All of typepad.com was blocked. I got an exception for Nick’s blog (since I was doing web stuff, using TopStyle, etc.) but I couldn’t comment in any of his posts becuase the comments processor goes through www.typead.com.

This is a big downside to these centralized services. It’s way too easy for a company (even accidentally) to shut down a whole chunk of the net at once.

When I brought up the blocked typepad.com issue with the filtering service we were using (N2H2’s Bess) they said, basically, “We just categorize, your administrators choose which ones to block.” But assigning typepad.com to a single category (”Web Page Hosting” - absolutely useless uber-topic, if you ask me) is stupid. There’s everything from tech blogs (like Nick’s) to porn (I assume, I wouldn’t actually know…) on Typepad.

Eventually these filtering companies are going to have to get more sophisticated. What happens when they start blocking NewsGator Online or Bloglines?

A true “baby with the bathwater” solution.