Hello! Big fan of NetNewsWire, thank you for the amazing work.
I like adding YouTube RSS feeds to my reader, but these are usually extremely temperamental. They do not work about half the day. This is fine for existing feeds - it’ll eventually fetch the update at some point when Google manages to work - but it makes it impossible to add a new feed, since the feed appears invalid to NetNewsWire. It errors out with “Can’t add a feed because no feed was found”. I assume this is because the feed URL is (a) not sending valid XML, and (b) returning a HTTP error code.
This means that I have to drop the URL in a Note and try again later, hoping Google is back up. This is a very suboptimal experience, and I usually just forget to add it.
What I’d like to request is that if one holds the Option key while pressing Add, NetNewsWire adds the feed anyway (perhaps with a warning), on the assumption it will later become available. This strikes me as a very Mac-like solution to this issue - an out-of-the-way power feature that ought not interfere with the usual user flow.
It’s possible that this feature already exists, and if so, I’m happy to be pointed to it. Many thanks.
I agree, I don’t think NNW is behaving incorrectly either. This is more of a feature request, so that I may add a new feed even during those periods when YT is non-responsive. It can remain empty until such time as it successfully updates (whenever YT decides to start responding again).
Currently, to my knowledge, it is not possible to add a new YT feed at all while YT is non-responsive.
The tricky part of this is that a person might not actually be adding a valid feed.
So it would get force-added, but it would never work (if it’s not a valid feed). Which might then become a support issue later.
One way around this is to manually edit the OPML file to add the feed. (Probably best to do so when NetNewsWire is not running, since it assumes it owns that file while it’s running.)
But even that might not work out as expected if you’re using a syncing system, since NetNewsWire won’t know to sync that feed.
That’s true! It’s one reason I’m proposing gating this behind holding the Option key + possibly a warning dialog?
I wouldn’t want this to be the base functionality, as I’d have the same fear of this causing issues for ordinary users. I’m picturing it as a power user feature (like holding Option while e.g. opening Photos). Something that ordinary users don’t need and will never see, but someone holding Option is explicitly summoning up. A little warning confirmation dialog could make it clear that the feed is not currently available, and it’s on the user to be sure that the feed will become available in the future at the given URL.
I appreciate this is not a huge priority, it’s more of a nice-to-have QoL improvement. YT is a significant use case for NNW for me, and currently I often just cannot add YT feeds. I’ve considered spinning up a server to privately mirror my chosen YT feeds, but that seems needlessly over-complicated. A feature like this would be very helpful for me, hence the suggestion.
Essentially, the flow I’m picturing is something like this:
User opens the “New Feed…” dialog
User adds in their own feed URL and name
User holds down Option and clicks “Add”
NNW tries to add feed normally, but if it fails, rather than showing the usual “Can’t add a feed because no feed was found” alert, it branches to a “This URL does not appear to contain a valid feed. Are you sure you wish to add this URL?” confirm dialog. (Again, this only ever appears if the user held down Opt while pressing add, so it should never appear to ordinary users.)
If the user presses Yes, the feed is added as though it were an empty list of posts. A blank XML file could be used for the initial add to substitute for what ought to have been at the URL.
Eventually, the URL resolves and the feed updates as per normal.
