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…

Hard To Synchronize

Is it so hard to sync feeds across computers? One should think not. I found NewsGator’s online version plain ridiculous. Just like Snappy the Clam back in July 2007, I could not get this to work: my attempts at deleting a folder were unsuccessful, despite the fact that I tried six different browsers on two different platforms.

My NetNewsWire install (v3.1.1; the latest version) started throwing non-stop newsgator syncing errors. These were temporarily resolved by deleting the Web Cache.

On top of everything else, it appears there are inconsistencies in the way NewsGators’ applications sync: NetNewsWire sends the status of feeds before it downloads them while FeedDemon appears to be doing exactly the opposite. This is how I lost my 6,000+ feed items.

Beta Bait

It looks like NewsGator has released a half baked product on the market. It’s disappointing stuff: if you can’t fully support a product, please don’t release it—I’d rather not bite the beta bait. If you want to run public beta programs, please do like Opera and many others: release beta previews to whoever is daring & patient enough to help debug it. Thoroughly test the product before releasing it to the public as final, and when you do beat your drum, make sure it works the way you advertise it.

Bye NetNewsWire, Welcome Back Vienna

I’ll go back to my old system now. Two computers. Two different feed streams: one for work related feeds, the other for all else.

I will keep using FeedDemon (just like TopStyle, it’s a great Nick Bradbury application). But until others are reporting positive results after biting the beta bait, I’ll dump NetNewsWire and go back to using Vienna.