newsgator

Feed Synch Troubles: More like Craigslist hating Newsgator…

Jeromey Balderrama

Just wanted to follow-up to my original post on my troubles with Newsgator and Craiglist feeds.  Newsgator Support emailed me to let me know that they are aware of this issue, and have been working with Craigslist to get this resolved.  As it turns out, the issue lies with Craigslist blocking traffic from Newsgator’s synchronization servers, forbidding them access to their RSS feeds.  They claim Newsgator was requesting data too often.  Trying to comply, Newsgator Support turned back the threshold to once every 2 days.  With a site like Craigslist, once very two days is kissing goodbye to some potentially good deals.

What a mess!  I understand that Craigslist has their reasons, but I don’t understand why they would want to block and RSS aggregator service from being able to retrieve feeds.  If Craigslist isn’t getting data from Newsgator’s requests, they’re going to get it from my feed reader (and right now three times between my devices) . You would think more people using aggressor services like Google Reader, Bloglines and Newsgator would reduce the number of requests to Craigslist servers.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but I just hope a resolution can be found soon.  The thing I enjoy about Newsgator is that it interacts with the FeedDemon clients installed on both my laptop and desktop, as well as has an attractive mobile interface that works with my Treo.

Newsgator hating Craigslist?

Jeromey Balderrama

I’m in a technology-griping mood, so this may be the first in a series of posts about tech things that bug me this week.

I’m an RSS junkie, and to facilitate my addiction I read all of my RSS feeds using FeedDemon, using the Newsgator Synchronization that was offered with purchasing FeedDemon.  I’ve been very happy with using Newsgator to give me my RSS feeds.  It allows me to use FeedDemon over my home computer and laptop and keep the feeds in sync.  They also have an awesome mobile web site that lets me read feeds on my phone when I have a few extra minutes.

All of this functionality is not without it’s drawbacks.  First, your reliant on Newsgator’s synched copy of the feed your reading.  For the most part it’s relatively quick, but there are instances where Newsgator’s copy of the feed has been out of sync for hours and sometimes 1-2 days.  I’ve ultimately accepted that, but now it’s been almost a week and Newsgator has yet to synchronize with any of my Craigslist feeds.  I thought maybe Craigslist changed the way they delivered RSS, but that hasn’t been the case.  My attempts to unsubscribe and re-subscribe through the Newsgator feeds only results in the delivery of the same old content (most recent was 9/23).

I don’t know if anyone else is experiencing this, but it’s really discouraging for a service that has normally been quite reliable.  I could disable the synchronization for the Craigslist feeds, but then that takes away my 2-computer and mobile abilities.  I’m almost half-tempted to use Google Reader, but I love the Feed Demon software and I don’t want to sift through two copies of my feeds.

Technorati tags: newsgator, feeddemon, rss