NetNewsFired

My continuing NetNewsWire woes (no link, only working software gets links): this morning manual feed refresh just stopped working. I choose refresh all and after a few seconds the action completes and nothing has happened. Not only that, NNW is practicing a particularly nasty form of lock-in: it won’t export my feeds correctly to OPML. I read about 500 feeds or so, and when I export, whether I export to all in flat format, all in groups format, selected in flat or selected in groups, it manages to export only 181 of those files. Pretty good way to make sure I don’t switch to another newsreader, eh? Not only this, but according to this bug report, this has been an open bug for better than a year. I have always liked the feel of NNW and it has been a good piece of software in the past, but this kind of sloppiness for a paid product is unacceptable. The NewsGator “sync” has been awful from day one. About the only thing I’ve liked about it is that my additions or deletions from my feed list have also been synced, although like every other aspect of this software, it’s done it inconsistently. As soon as I can figure out a way to cleanly (and completely) export my OPML from the program, I’ll take my feedreading elsewhere. BlogBridge is looking damn good at the moment.

UPDATE: Ironically enough, I can export all the feeds from NewsGator online. But this is crazy: what if I didn’t have a NewsGator account? I’ve reimported everything back into Bloglines, and I’m trying out other RSS readers. I’ll post more about this when I’ve had some time to play with them all a bit. Until then, I’m just using Bloglines for now. It at least works.