InfoQ: “Don’t Call Us We’ll Call You?”
July 4, 2006InfoQ: If I missed the “contact us” link, I apologize in advance.
I’ve read a couple of entries on javablogs from InfoQ, so jumped over to their site to check it out. I tried to subscribe to their RSS feed with Bloglines but no feeds were available. I surmised I had to register at InfoQ to get the feed. I went ahead and signed up (using a Firefox plugin to generate a password based on the current URL) and when I went to subscribe to my RSS feed (again with Bloglines) I was exposed to the “InfoQ Personalized” feeds for [insert InfoQ member name here]!” I wasn’t too thrilled about the ability of others to subscribe to my own “personalized” feed, but no problem. It turns out my feed wasn’t listed. Evenutally, I received an email from InfoQ with the link to my “personalized” feed so I was able to subscribe in Bloglines manually.
I logged out and then thought I should notify someone at InfoQ of this little problem. When I tried to log back in, a nice little Javascript box pops up to enter my id and password. Well, guess what? My password was invalid because the password generator depends on the URL. I’ve run into this before so I clicked on the “Forgot your password?” link. Nothing happened. No notificiation that email was sent, no “Try Again” message, nothing.
Why am I telling you all this? Because I can’t tell InfoQ since there is no “contact us” link (that I could find) on their site. InfoQ is a new site, launched June 8th. They must be confident their site is perfect or, just as likely, they’re not interested in what you have to say. I will mention here there is a link to “contribute news” but I had no news, just a complaint about the usability of their site.
InfoQ is now calling you.
We will add contact info to the about page, sorry about that! 
About not getting the email verification, I think the email is being labelled as SPAM or something, did you check your spam folders for it? I can confirm that our email verifications are working as I just tested it a couple of times now.
If that doesn’t work, just email bugs at infoq.com and we’ll manually set your account.
Also, about the RSS feed, we could do a better job of explaining how that works on the site. RSS feeds are personalized by default and all you need to do is grab the link from the RSS button on the site and it is automatically associated with your account if you are logged in.
The reason bloglines search can’t work is because the RSS url visible on the site when you visit it has a custom URL just for you, so the correct way to grab the feed is to go to infoq and do it manually. We can’t support bloglines because it would be impossible to provide personalized feeds to bloglines search bots.
Also, the issue with bloglines showing feeds of other InfoQ users is actually a privacy problem with bloglines that we have reported to them. When you type in our web address, instead of scanning our site for a feed, bloglines scans it’s own database for users feeds to infoq and thus reveals everyone elses feeds. Unfortunately that is bloglines choice and we can’t really do anything about it.
thanks,
Floyd