My reader just died

6 Replies

I have been using a very nifty little RSS reader the past 6 months. It is called Snarfer. It is free, and did not fill my view with ads, nor does it map all my behaviors – or at least so it seems.

As it is a software product, it is regularly updated. It is also a fairly new tool as I understand, and are still working on the main functionalities. Some nice features I loved was (yes, past tense) keyword searching, blog searching and Internet searching. It gave me one place to monitor the world!

And I just loved it!

So when the tool told me it was due for an update, I went ahead. Downloaded version 0.9.x, and ran the updater.

And on my screen flashed a series of error messages.

Error

Something went wrong. No matter what I did, I could no longer use my favorite reader. And I am now out of control. I can no longer monitor my fellow bloggers. I am no longer able to constantly be alerted of topics of my interest.

I AM BLIND!

I will consider downgrading – if it is possible.

This is only a simple example of what can happen when you are patching and updating your systems. Yes, I use Snarfer a lot, but imagine if this had been your CRM tool. Or your billing system. What if your production facility no longer can use the CRC software?

Just try it for yourself. Try to calculate the costs of your main production tool is down one day. What will be the results? What are the costs – direct and indirect? What are you willing to do in order to avoid such an outage?

No wonder why patch management becomes critical.

Ps – please post your tips on a killer RSS-reader! But – no online tools, please, I need to bring my stuff with me when traveling!

—– UPDATE

Thanks to Snarfer for great support – my favorite RSS reader – including my web-searches and search agents are back up and working! Not bad for a free software, if you ask me!

And thank you my readers for helping me considering other options. Stefan, using Firefox just rocks! 

  • http://andyitguy.blogspot.com Andy ITGuy

    Kai, have you tried blogbridge? I used to use it but I favor online readers b/c I don’t travel much but do use several different PC’s through out the week and like to have my feeds available wherever I may be. Rothman uses Blogbridge and he really likes it. I think Farnum uses it also.

  • Stefan

    Hi,

    If you use Firefox, you can also use the built in live bookmark facility in conjunction with the “Brief” extension. It will use a configurable folder to take the live bookmarks from and display them as news items, which can be marked as read/unread then.
    It also caches the entries, so you can read them offline as well.

  • Kai

    Hi Andy,

    no, I have not yet tried that one. I just love having the stuff with me on my computer – then I am not bound by having to connect everywhere I go. 

  • Kai

    Hi Stefan,

    thank you for visiting! I will certainly look into Brief – as Firefox is my browser of choice! I knew it had to be a solution!

  • Anonymous

    I’ve got about 200 feeds which I manage with feedreader http://feedreader.com/ You can set it to download enclosers if you want to automatically get podcasts etc. I don’t think you can set it to download all messages – just the subject line then the article is d/l when you view it, and cached so you can read offline again

  • Kai

    Thanks! I will review Feedreader, but I must admit I miss the search facilities of Snarfer…and downloading all content in the background.