

It was nice to see that they’re active, and I added them to my list of iCloud subscriptions.Although a number of services like Feedly stepped up to the plate over the last two years in Google’s absence, one of the original Mac news aggregator applications instead got caught with its pants down. A similar thing happened in the “On My iPhone” and “On My iPad” accounts when I installed NNW on those devices.Īnyway, before deleting those subscriptions (remember, I want all of them synced through my iCloud account), I noticed a few blogs that I’d somehow lost track of over the years and which hadn’t made it into my homemade system. Presumably these subscriptions were saved in some preferences file in my Library folder, but I was doing this on my new MacBook Air, and I didn’t use Migration Assistant when setting it up. One last pleasant surprise: For reasons I don’t fully understand, when I first opened NetNewsWire, it populated the “On My Mac” account with several blogs I used to read. A testament to BBEdit’s tooling and NetNewsWire’s adherence to Postel’s Law. I put in ten minutes of work at the most and had a fully functioning blog reader with over 40 subscriptions. NetNewsWire accepted my hastily made OPML file without complaint and figured out all the titles and other details on its own. I guessed that I could get away with leaving out all the attributes except xmlUrl, so another go-round with Text▸Prefix/Suffix Lines…, this time Inserting rather than Removing, left me with xml: I copied the top several lines and bottom two lines and pasted them directly into my new file (I did change the ). To see what kind of OPML NetNewsWire was expecting, I added two feeds “by hand” and exported them. Now it was time to convert this list to OPML format so NNW could import it. Then a couple more deletions got me down to a simple list of feed URLs:
NETNEWSWIRE SYNCING FAILED CODE
I copied this code into a new BBEdit document, and used its Text▸Prefix/Suffix Lines… command to strip off the quotation marks and commas. First, the list is built directly into the Python code: python:Īs you can see, it’s really two lists, one for JSON feeds and one for regular RSS/Atom/XML feeds.

You’re probably already using it.īut I do want to tell you how I got the list of feeds from my homemade system into NNW. If you’re a Mac user interested in RSS readers, you’ve read the reviews and know how fast and “Mac-assed” it is. I keep thinking of Gabe Weatherhead’s wise assessment of the Google Reader apocalypse:īigger revelation: Google built a service that you configure with all your interests and biases. I just don’t trust RSS services to stay in business. But with the addition of iCloud syncing, it ticks all the boxes.īy the way, Rule 3 is not entirely due to my being a cheap bastard. Initially, the rejuvenated NNW broke all my rules until recently, it broke Rule 3. It cannot force me to use a third-party RSS service to do the syncing.I have a few unbreakable rules for an RSS reader: It’s possible I’ll find something in NNW that’ll make me switch back, but it’s looking good so far. I’ve been happy with my homemade RSS reading system, but it’s generally better to be in the hands of an expert, and you’d be hard-pressed to find someone more expert at RSS parsing than Brent Simmons. Next post Previous post Back to NetNewsWireĮver since NetNewsWire came back from the dead, I’ve been thinking I’d eventually switch to it.
