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Raymond Lewallen

Framework Design, Agile Coach, President Oklahoma City Developers Group, Microsoft MVP C#, TDD, Continuous Integration, Patterns and Practices, Domain Driven Design, Speaker, VB.Net, C# and Sql Server

Pains of changing rss feed readers

I've been using the same rss reader for quite awhile now called RssReader. I've enjoyed using this reader, but now I would like to change to a new reader. I've looked at SharpReader and OMEA Reader. I've downloaded and installed both and compared all three that I now have and have decided I would like to use OMEA Reader.

First, RssReader doesn't export feed subscriptions into OPML format, only XML. OMEA only imports feed subscriptions that are in OPML format. So I went out and I found a converter for XML to OPML. I did that to my XML feed subscription file I exported from RssReader, but OMEA complains the file is corrupt. I went in and exported the 2 feeds I added to OMEA to compare the OPML files, and of course they are different, way different. The program I downloaded doesn't appear to be up-to-date with its OPML formatting. Holy cow, I have over 165 feeds that I subscribe too, and I certainly don't want to go and subscribe to each feed one by one.

But hey, I have over 1500 blog posts saved on my hard drive via RssReader. If I switch to another reader, the new reader isn't going to download all the feed posts dating back to the beginning of the blog. So far, its seems OMEA only pulls the last 35 posts for dotnetjunkies, which is not the readers fault, that just happens to be the number of posts kept in the aggregation file. I continuously use the filter and search functions of RssReader to find old posts I want to go back and refer to. Without being able to move all those historical posts to a new reader, I have to keep the old reader so I have access to the historical posts, many of which are well over a year old. So now I will be stuck using 2 readers, and I really would like to switch to OMEA, but at what cost?

Has anyone else changed your reader after using a particular reader for an extended period of time? What did you do about all those historical posts you have saved? Does anyone know of an XML-OPML converter that actually works? Any suggestions? Comments? Are there other news readers out there, for free, that you prefer? What is everybody using and doing about these issues? I've almost decided on just sticking with RssReader for the single reason of the historical posts.


Comments

Steve Portigal said:

I'm in a similar position. RSSReader has the annoying habit of every once in a while trashing the storage.xml file - I've been backing it up but it's not painless to get it to work again after a crash and in general it makes me just really not trust the software.

I know it's possible to convert that file into something that (maybe, as you suggest) other readers can parse, but I can't figure out how to do that - seems like one needs to be running PERL somewhere to do that (?!) - not good for us end-user types.

I was using FeedReader but it was just so buggy, so I converted, but RssReader is a black hole - you can't easily convert away. Very frustrating. Anyone that can help ME get set up on a new reader?
# August 4, 2005 9:39 AM

Amit said:

check out this link

http://pb.meselia.net/it/rssreader-opml/

works fine.
# December 9, 2005 10:24 PM

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About Raymond Lewallen

Working primarily in the public sector during his career, Raymond has designed and built several high profile enterprise level applications for all levels of the government. Raymond now works as a solutions architect for EMC. Raymond is an agile coach, Microsoft MVP C# and also president of the Oklahoma City Developers Group and Oklahoma Agile Developers Group. Raymond spends a lot of his time learning and teaching such things as Test Driven Development, Domain Driven Design, Design Patterns and Extreme Programming practices and principles, to name a few. Raymond is also an advocate of Alt.Net. Raymond is primarily a framework guy, so don't ask him anything about UI :) Check out Devlicio.us!