Thank you, Google Reader humanoids

I recently had a little trouble with my beloved Google Reader account. Specifically, the the All items counter was displaying the expected number of unread items, and the Updated subscriptions list was properly listing updated feeds and tags. However, the All items view itself wasn’t presenting me with a consilidated list of unread items. In their place: “Your reading list has no unread items.”

After a day or so of having to expand each tag to view new items by subscription, I decided that it was time to mosey on over to the Google Reader group and file a complaint with the board. A couple days passed, and I posted an update to document the fact that the issue was ongoing, in the event that it was being experienced by any number of other users.

Shortly thereafter, I received a message from one Justin H—-, Google Reader Engineer, informing me that they’d seen my message, and were already looking into the issue. A few hours later:

We’ve figured out what was going wrong with your account. It was an <embed> tag in one of your feeds (hexblog) without a src attribute, which caused our server to choke. We have a fix, and will try to get it out there as soon as possible. Thanks for being patient with us, you’ll get your Reader back in a jiffy.

And sure enough, a follow-up arrived that evening indicating that the team had developed and deployed a fix.

Thanks, Justin, and the rest of the Google Reader team. Keep up the great work!

PS – The Hex blog feed seems to be marginally broken, indeed.