I really like Leopard’s new RSS functionality in Mail.app. I strongly prefer to have my RSS feeds collected in Mail – I find it far less distracting than have constantly-incrementing numbers in my Safari bookmarks bar, as I feel compelled to look at them and clear the distraction – I’ve migrated almost all* of my RSS feeds to Mail.
But the PubSub framework, which is responsible for updating and storing those feeds, is extremely unreliable. According to Mail.app, there hasn’t been any new RSS items in my collection in over 24 hours – through manual checks I know this to be untrue. Manually updating does nothing, as does restarting Mail.app, and I’m reluctant to forcibly restart PubSubAgent, fearing it will leave data in an inconsistent state (I believe it uses SQLite3). Only a restart seems to cure the problem, and I don’t use a Mac so I can restart it every now and again to regain crashed functionality …
Let’s hope Apple can address this soon.
* I left RailsCasts in Safari’s RSS menu. This is the only way I can find to not have it attempt to download every single movie attachment in the feed – several gigabyte’s worth of files I already have!
PS. Seems “RSS” is fast becoming, or has already become, the catch-all umbrella term for any “feed” service, whether it’s served by the actual RSS format or not. Personally I prefer the Atom format, but seemingly everyone refers to that as RSS as well – including Apple, and, I have to confess, me. Just one of those things I guess – there’s no other simple, commonly-understand name that refers to the concept, so RSS it is, even if it’s ambiguous at best and wrong much of the time at worst. C’est la vie.
PPS. Another annoyance with RSS (hehe, there I go again, ok “feeds”) is in implementation. Some sites don’t supply the whole text in their feed – just a summary, or the first few words. This seems to defeat the point – I don’t want a “notification of updates service”, I want the whole thing archived so I can examine at my leisure. No. 1 offender: Google Groups.
UPDATE: Quitting PubSubAgent in Activity Monitor (or kill from the terminal) works fine to restore functionality without a reboot. No need for a force quit so hopefully it’s exiting cleanly and DB corruption won’t be an issue.
Tags: Atom, PubSub, PubSubAgent, RSS
December 1st, 2007 at 4:28 am
I share your preference for reading feeds in Mail, where they are at the bottom of my folder listing and out-of-sight/out-of-mind. Much less distracting and much less of a time drain.
Unfortunately, I share not only your preferences, but your experiences with the feature as well. As you note, manually updating has no effect at all most of the time, and quitting Mail.app only seems to work some of the time. I generally don’t reboot ever, unless forced to, so although I am sure rebooting would help I can confirm that the feeds wake up again after a period of time anyway.
Another annoyance is that when you Command-Shift-N to check for new *mail*, Mail.app decides to update all your RSS feeds as well. Maybe this would be all right if it actually worked, but it doesn’t. All you see is a bunch of useless activity in your activity window.
(Another gripe: why have a separate activity window and an activity viewer in the main window as well, each of which seems to display different things? Has to be the most bizarre piece of UI design I’ve seen from Apple in a long, long time.)
I’ve also seen one issue that used to crop up with Safari: sometimes it will “forget” what feeds you’ve read and mistakenly tell you that all of the articles, literally hundreds of them dating back days or weeks or even months, are unread. Annoying because you either have to mark them all as read in blanket fashion, perhaps scanning through visually trying to find the ones which really are new, and you risk either wasting a lot of time (because you check carefully) or overlooking something important (because you check quickly). Very annoying and very flakey. I find it hard to believe that they can ship something that flakey and haven’t fixed it yet (the feed framework was already flakey back in Safari 2/Tiger).
On the subject of Railscasts; that’s the kind of feed which I think is best managed in neither Mail nor Safari, but iTunes.
April 3rd, 2008 at 6:43 am
Agreed — PubSubAgent is a horrid little piece of software. It’s recently been taking 98-99% of CPU for no reason whatsoever, killing my MBP battery.
PubSubAgent should never be above 10% of CPU, and if it is, it the process should be automatically killed because something is obviously wrong. Something like setrlimit but on the CLI…
I actually like seeing the RSS feeds in my Safari bookmark bar, but understand the alternate view. Regardless, the underpinngs of either approach need a fundamental redesign.