[Update: Bloglines fixed itself overnight. The problem does not appear to be related to CoolPlayer 9, WP 2.1, or FeedBurner 2.2.]

It appears the CoolPlayer 9 plugin may be causing problems with Bloglines. This is the error message I get in Bloglines:

Bloglines has encountered an error trying to fetch the latest version of this feed. Bloglines handles errors automatically, no action is required by you. The error was:

The feed does not appear to exist. This can be caused by the feed URL being incorrect, or it can be caused by a configuration issue with the server hosting the feed. If this error continues, you should check the feed URL and, if it is wrong, subscribe to the correct URL.

The plugin does not seem to affect the other RSS readers, like Google Reader and NetVibes. I'm posting this in case you are using Bloglines and didn't see my previous post on CoolPlayer 9. This is also a test for me. I'm guessing the problem is related to CoolPlayer 9. It could also be related to upgrading to WordPress 2.1 and FeedBurner 2.2 plugin. I'll know in a few minutes if I can see this post in Bloglines. If it's the plugin, hopefully it will only affect the post with the coolplayer tag and not all posts.

Last week, I posted about the spikes in my RSS feed subscriber stats. Thanks to Jessiec at FeedBurner, I was able to determine the source of the spikes was Pageflakes. On the days of the spikes, Pageflakes subscriptions jumped to about 120 and then dropped back to zero on the non-spike days.

I was puzzled by the Pageflakes spikes so I added my feeds to Pageflakes. When I reviewed my FeedBurner stats later, I noticed all my feeds spiked up on the day I added them to Pageflakes. However, after the initial spikes, the number of Pageflakes subscribers dropped to zero until I visited my Pageflakes page again. Then once again, my feed count spiked up and then returned back to zero the next day.

Take a look at the table below. I visited my PageFlakes page on December 26th. As you can see, one visit resulted in a relatively big increase in my feed subscription stats. So, by visiting my PageFlakes page daily, I could inflate my feed stats fairly easily (I'm not condoning this; just pointing out it would be easy to do). Someone could go to town on this by creating multiple accounts on PageFlakes. BTW, TechCrunch also has a post about the PageFlakes spikes.

Something odd happened to one of my FeedBurner feed last week. As you can see in the feed subscribers graph below, there are two big spikes — Sunday and Tuesday. I have no idea why. The rest of the week is about right. It seems really odd there would be big spikes for feed subscribers. What happened after the spikes? Did all those people unsubscribed from the feed?