I’m afraid that this sounds like database corruption. The cause of this is unknown to us at this point. Vienna’s database is located at “~/Library/Application Support/Vienna.messages.db”. If you backup your home folder frequently (which everyone should), then you can quit Vienna, delete “messages.db”, and replace it with a recent backup. If you don’t have a backup, there may also be a file “messages.db.bak” in the same folder; check the last modification date on that, and if it’s recent enough, then you can quit Vienna, delete messages.db, and remove the “.bak” extension to use your old database.

If you don’t have either of those things, then you still should be able to export your subscriptions and re-import them. Export all of your subscriptions, quit Vienna, move “messages.db” to a different folder, and re-launch Vienna. That will create a fresh database, and then you can import your subscriptions again.

Jeff Johnson, Vienna Developer on the cocoa|forge forum

Oh bother… Guess my Vienna database is corrupted. And I’m not one of those smart people making regular back ups of their home directory either.

This could be a blessing in disguise since I was not being able to keep up with my reading. I’ll take some time to clean out my messy RSS repository and start over. No doubt there will be a number of gems to links to…

Is it time to call the wonderful iGTD software project dead? I’m afraid so. Further development seems unlikely at this stage. It’s a shame—it was one of my favourite Mac applications.

The project hasn’t been updated for nearly a year now. There are some forum posts on the subject: Bartek the developer has gone through a rough patch and has been unable to work on the project.

I don’t want to speculate much about the nature of his woes, but I have always wondered about the incredible speed of the updates & upgrades of the application. I deemed it unsustainable for a single person to update an application several times a month. Guess it all became too much for him.

Perhaps it is time to set the project free and allow others to take over? In any case, I wish you well Bartek. You’ve delivered wonderful free software, but it came at a price…

That’s it. I give up. I have tried to understand the way NewsGator syncs its products and get it to work for me. In the process I’ve lost over 6,000 feed items and many hours attempting to retrieve them. Was it too good to be true? All I wanted was a reliable system to sync feeds on different computers across platforms. The applications themselves are fine—it’s just the feed synchronisation I ran into trouble with.
(more…)

Newsgator has just made a few of its products available for free:

• FeedDemon
  
• NetNewsWire
• NewsGator Online

This might be one of the only ways to easily and continously synchronise feeds between a Mac and a Windows machine. I certainly shall be looking into this option (despite the fact that it would mean I’d no longer use the excellent Vienna RSS reader for the Mac).

The next major upgrade of phpBB is finally among us. My hat off to the developers of this fine piece of open source forum software.

This release sports a large number of improvements and functional additions. Based on my tests with v3 beta installations personal favourites include:

• general usability enhancements
• improvements to default forum style
• creation of subforums
• password protected forums
• admin can now set global moderators
• multiple group leaders for usergroups
• banning by IP address (previously possible by applying a hack)
• active topics search
• disallow non-registered user memberlist viewing (previously possible by applying a hack)

Further Reading

• press announcement
• feature comparison