Sharpreader.​..ugh

Why is it that Sharpreader manages to remember that I want to sort by date on everything but a few feeds?  For some reason, Channel9 posts from months ago are placed at the top of the list!

This is just a WILD guess, but I've had a lot of trouble lately with Channel 9 feeds in Sharpreader. Other feeds seem to work fine.

For me the problem is that in my own threads feed and Channel 9 Team watched threads feed, there appears almost every post from tech-off and coffeehouse on the top. Looking at the feed xml I don't see anything wrong however! It maybe that Channel 9 made some changes to the feeds recently and Sharpreader doesn't like those changes.

There's a reason SharpReader is free!

Spend a few bucks upgrading to something like FeedDemon. I did and I'm glad I did.

irascian wrote:

There's a reason SharpReader is free!

Spend a few bucks upgrading to something like FeedDemon. I did and I'm glad I did.

It seems to be working quite well nearly all the time.

irascian wrote:

There's a reason SharpReader is free!

Spend a few bucks upgrading to something like FeedDemon. I did and I'm glad I did.

Or to put a negative spin on that statement, the reason for all those crappy feeds is because of the competition of whose reader can read the most malformed feeds. Regretfully SharpReader has to take some blame too since since I've heard it has been pretty good reading feeds where many other aggregators have failed. Since it's in need of updates I'll probably change to other reader soon though.

Ideally though we should not need a commercial, constantly updated software to read the RSS.. given it's that easily readable xml, right?

It'll be interesting to see if Vista has some RSS/Atom API and how malformed feeds it reads. If then every aggregator would start using that API and then MS removed the "hacks", all feeds would be forced to adhere to the spec. Doubt that'll happen though!

I write my own reader (www.feedisgood.com) and am constantly frustrated by trying to cope with bad feeds. Even some major sites and sites related to RSS often have feeds that are not even valid XML. There must be a lot of feed readers that dont even bother trying to validate that it is a valid document to get around these problems.

DoomBringer wrote:

It seems to be working quite well nearly all the time.

Why not download the trial version of FeedDemon and compare the two for a 30 day trial period. SharpReader is a good "first" RSS reader but it hasn't kept pace with the features in newer RSS readers. I only downloaded FeedDemon because I was a big fan of the author's Top Style Pro for style sheet editing. Within a couple of days I realised I never wanted to go back to SharpReader.

Of course your mileage may vary, but I'd be surprised if it did.

I think all feed should have to be valid (and all parsers only accept valid feeds). After all, we don't want a repeat of the browser wars - i.e. to view this feed you require....

Like HTML/CSS, Atom and RSS are standards so you should not require specific software to interpret.

I'm working on a shareware RSS reader - Feedpedia. It's being developed in .NET 2.0, and it has several unique features that you can't find in any RSS reader today. And I'm not talking about useless features.

I'd like to tell you more but since Travis is working on his own RSS reader, I don't want to give too many details yet. Wait a couple of weeks until I release the first version. In the meanwhile you can register for receiving the beta at Feedpedia.com.

P.S.: No, I'm not going to sell your email address to spammers

Microsoft could fix the crappy feeds issue by dropping RSS support from Vista and only including very strict final ATOM support. This would force major sites to both add ATOM support and test their feeds againt a very strict parser. Though there's always the risk of MS interpreting the spec wrong.. Doh!

owing microsoft, they'll probably be a tool to validate your feed. i mean if rss is so tightly woven into the operating system, you don't want a malformed feed that could cause serious disruption.

Netvibes is the way to go. Just yesterday they updated their service with read / undread on items in rss feeds. It is very, very cool.

androidi wrote:

Microsoft could fix the crappy feeds issue by dropping RSS support from Vista and only including very strict final ATOM support. This would force major sites to both add ATOM support and test their feeds againt a very strict parser. Though there's always the risk of MS interpreting the spec wrong.. Doh!

There's no reason to drop RSS just to "force" valid feeds.  The RSS spec is just as thorough as Atom, and unlike HTML is also XML based (even the RDF format is XML based).  You're showing your elitism .

The RSS spec was (or still is?) pretty vague about how certain elements are to be used.

I have that problem sometimes too, but that's not as bad, as the fact that it downloads posts from many months ago, and so it puts them as unread, but to see them I would have to scroll down a long way and if you do that it crashes

I have a category that has 6000 items in it, it includes Channel9, slashcrap and some others, and it seems SharpReader doesn't handle that many items very well

other than that, is good!

None of the RSS readers out now are giving me what i want when it comes to custimization and UI.

All are clones of either a 2-pane or 3-pane design.

WE NEED INNOVATION STAT

wkempf wrote:

There's no reason to drop RSS just to "force" valid feeds.  The RSS spec is just as thorough as Atom, and unlike HTML is also XML based (even the RDF format is XML based).  You're showing your elitism .

Guess it wasn't obvious but it was both a joke and a way to overstate that I'd rather see strict or no RSS parsing in Vista than one that reads all kind of malformed XML and what not.

Wow do i have a surprise for all you RSS loving maniacs! Wooohoooo.

(ps. I'm one of those RSS loving maniacs.)
- Steve