Trying to read my feeds I get some nice 500 errors from Bloglines:

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@bloglines.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Apache/2.2.5-dev (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.5-dev OpenSSL/0.9.7a Server at www.bloglines.com Port 80

This kind of error is interesting because while Bloglines’ home page is up and working, their service is not, and that’s something very hard for monitoring tools like Pingdom to monitor without the cooperation of the web service. If there’s ever a standard created for an open web 2.0 service, an interface by which one can query which parts of it are up and down should factor in. It could be as simple as a ping, or as complex as a list of components and statuses. Just fire off a request to api.example.com/ping and get back “up” or “down.” You could use api.example.com/uptime for information about uptime and api.example.com/status for more detailed information.

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