Sho Fukamachi Online

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.