figby.com

I’ve long complained about the fact that Bloglines lists several feeds when you try to subscribe to a WordPress weblog. This isn’t their fault, of course—it’s because WordPress offers a bewildering array of feeds by default, and that in turn is an indirect result of years of bickering among RSS standardistas. But that’s another story.

At any rate, the folks at Bloglines have come up with a solution to the problem. You can now claim feeds in a process similar to Technorati’s. Once claimed, you can mark all but one of the feeds as duplicates, so that only your One True Feed is listed when people try to subscribe.

Two caveats:

• The feed you choose as “Not a duplicate” must be the first one Bloglines lists for the site. Otherwise, it won’t list ANY feeds when someone uses their bookmarklet to subscribe. I’ve verified this on two of my weblogs, but it may not be consistent, so some testing is called for.
• I’m not sure what happens when existing subscribers are subscribed to a feed you mark as a duplicate. In one case, I was still subscribed to an empty feed, and in another, the feed disappeared from my subscriptions. Proceed with caution if you have lots of subscribers.

Aside from that, it works well. You can also edit your feed’s description, image, and favicon for use on Bloglines, and specify whether the feed will show up in searches. Nice work!

[via Lifehacker]