FeedDemon too reliant on NewsGator
Posted by Neil Crosby on May 10, 2006 07:35 AM
I love FeedDemon. I use it at work, and until I swapped my desktop box from a Windows PC to a Mac Mini I used it at home as well. I really like that it integrates with NewsGator so that you can synchronise feeds between different computers. This is all good.
What isn’t good is just how closely tied the two are. A few weeks ago, NewsGator went down for about twelve hours for “maintenance”. This, in itself, shouldn’t be catastrophic. The problem was that because of the way FeedDemon is tied so closely to the NewsGator service now it was not able to determine that NewsGator was down and temporarily download its feeds straight from source. Instead, every few minutes during that twelve hour period, it popped up a message saying that it couldn’t connect to NewsGator prompting many users to shut down their favourite feed reader for the day. Still, lessons were learnt, and this should be fixed for the next version of FeedDemon.
Cut to yesterday. At work we have several RSS feeds which for various reasons are only available internally (can you tell what’s coming yet?). Because one of them contained information which it would really be a good idea for me to be able to track, I decided to subscribe to it using FeedDemon. What did I end up with? I pop-up telling me that NewsGator could not connect to the feed. Well of course it couldn’t! The feed isn’t accessible to the outside world! Instead of saying “oh dear, whoops”, wouldn’t it be a good idea to explicitly give the user the option to create an unsynchronised feed that FeedDemon pulls from source itself? It’s quite possible that I am actually able to do this with FeedDemon at the moment, but it would be really nice to be explicitly given the option to do so. Hopefully this will be something that’s also addressed in the next version of the software. [EDIT: By putting a local feed in a folder that does not get syncronised you can avoid the NewsGator error message.]
Whilst I’ve been writing this, it would seem that version 2.0.0.22 of FeedDemon has been released, which definitely adresses the first issue.
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Comments
by Phil on May 10, 2006 02:28 PM
Hey,
You should switch to NetNewsWire - it syncs with any FTP server… i have 4 machines synced with my ftp account i setup for it and it works great.
by trovster on May 10, 2006 03:01 PM
I used to use FeedDemon, but then I started working in an office, so syncing wasn’t available at the time. I haven’t tried FeedDemon since it’s syncing with NewsGator, but I’ve got used to Netvibes now, which also allows me view the sites in their full designed glory, too.
by Neil Crosby![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.workingwith.me.uk/nav-commenters.gif)
on May 11, 2006 06:54 AM
Phil: I actually am using NetNewsWire on my Mac, but I’m just not as happy with it as I was with FeedDemon. In fact, the very next thing that I’m going to be writing about is my experience with NetNewsWire!
trovster: I’ve not had a look at Netvibes yet. Thanks for the heads-up - I’ll give it a look at the weekend.