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Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton
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2006-02-05.Naked Monoculture Bites MSDN
[Update 2006-02-14-08:22 -0800 Well, now I’m screwed. Although updating Newsgator from 2.5.9.366 to 2.5.12.495 solved the problem I had with blogs.msdn.com Atom 1.0 feeds, I now have a major feed subscription problem. [Update 2006–02–13–23:01 -0800 I need to eat some crow. I will not rename this post “Stupid Is as Stupid Does,” but I will add an account of how I could have solved the problem myself. Update 2006-02-05-16:20 -0800 I rounded some words and listed all of the blogs that I unsubscribed rather than go through the ordeal of converting my subscription from Atom to RSS 2.0 and merging the new subscription back into my organized collection of material. Update 2006-02-05-16:34 -0800 because I rounded some words too hastily.] {tags: MSDN blogs TROSTing NewsGator Atom 1 web development orcmid} 2006 February 14: My organization of subscriptions into Outlook Folders is being trashed by the NewsGator Outlook update. I don’t know whether to just cry and give up on personal computing or start a competing software company that won’t produce this kind of crap. I have successfully updated NewsGator, but now the way I have organized folders for my feed subscriptions is being broken by NewsGator every time I check for updated feeds. Instead of putting material into the specific folders I had specified (to help me break arrivals into categories that I will sort down further after review), NewsGator is renaming those target folders to match one of the feed names. Since the folder was being shared by multiple feeds, the delivery of those others to a specified place is now also broken. Meanwhile, the subscription directory is resetting feed delivery from a specific folder to the base news folder, so NewsGator is also flattening everything out as it continues monkeying around renaming the containers that have lots of subfolders that are important to me. This is a great demonstration of “if its not broke don’t fix it.” Does anybody wonder why users are reluctant to make upgrades? We have work to do and repairing this crap is not productive for us. Got it? The situation is aggravated by the fact that I had to update because of unilateral changes in a different software system. So solving that problem caused one that is even more severe for me, especially since I had accommodated myself to a workaround (gradually switching to RSS 2.0). I could have told Scott Watermasysk that it was too late to do any trouble-shooting. I wanted to be helpful and didn’t think about the downside. I am not a happy camper. I either have to delete or update about 180 subscriptions where NewsGator it has mysteriously changed my original delivery settings. I did check them after doing the update, and I didn’t see this massive change of feeds to <base>. And I have to try the manual fix before I check feeds again. Even then, I won’t know if I’ll have succeeded until I try it. This is way too much work and I am disgusted. I think I will be deleting many subscriptions. Since I have to make all of these major adjustments, the pain of finding a new product and keeping a known one is becoming comparable and I am very interested in finding an alternative feed reader that integrates smoothly in Outlook 2003. I’m open to suggestions. Hurry. 2006 February 13: I received an e-mail from Scott Watermasysk tonight. He got wind of my problem with the blogs.msdn.com Atom feeds and offered to work with me to isolate the problem. My first thought was, “More work for me.” It was a gracious offer and I knew I would accept it because I believe in supporting the support. I built an e-mail that demonstrated what I saw in the feeds since the sites were updated, along with how they showed up as broken in my feed reader. These are the only Atom feeds that I subscribe to that have failed, but I think all of the others (such as the feed on this blog) are still Atom 0.3. The remaining case that I hadn’t checked was whether there was an update to NewsGator 2.5 that was not reflected on the site. (The NewsGator download page only shows the major version.) I also checked the NewsGator knowledge base and couldn’t find anything except for an account of some problems with xmlbase in Atom 1.0. There was also talk of later versions than mine (2.5.9.366) having been made available. So I downloaded the latest NewsGator 2.5 install and confirmed that it is different than the one I was using. Once I installed it, I was able to re subscribe to Atom feeds on blogs.msdn.com and they downloaded perfectly. So version 2.5.12.495 of NewsGator 2.5 doesn’t have the problem. When I was down loading from NewsGator, I also noticed that I had downloaded a 2.5.12 version last October and not installed it. I wondered what had me do that so I looked in the feed that NewsGator supplies. Yes, on September 12 last year, I had received this notice:
I know why that was easy to miss: I had cratered a system and rebuilt just enough on a new machine to continue with my soon-to-be-failed masters dissertation project. At that point I was being careful not to fix anything that wasn’t broken. Later, when the blogs.msdn.com Atom feeds stopped working for me, there were avenues that I left unexplored before I gave up in frustration. That neglect was all mine. Telligent. The motto for Dallas-centered Telligent Systems is “Exceptional Service. Predictable Results.” Well, the results are starting to be predictable and I can say exceptional only with great irony. As the result of some sort of breaking change, the Atom Feeds on the Telligent-implemented MSDN Blogs no longer work properly for NewsGator Outlook. There was no announcement of the change and no acknowledgement of the problem. I am not the customer, MSDN is, but I let the first few blogs where I saw the breakage know about it. I see no improvement and it’s been over six days. Every day I end up having to delete another MSDN feed and resubscribe to the RSS 2.0 feed that is also available. It is becoming too painful and I’m not doing that any longer. I have no need for anything that a commercial Community Server license offers. So it is lame for me to announce that I never intend to do business with Telligent. 2006 February 13: As mentioned above, I have found resolution to the problem. I have left the following narrative intact because there remains some useful questions about how web applications are supported and verified and how the impact of changes is managed. And I overlooked a remedy that I already had in hand. Some BackgroundTelligent’s business is built around Community Server, a commercial collaboration system that includes Wiki, Blogging, RSS Feeds, and all of the other good stuff a commercial firm might find it important to pay big bucks for. This is expensive gear dressed up as a commercial high-grade product. There are the following interesting characteristics:
I often find the relationship between Microsoft and its suppliers to be peculiar. I have heard contractors not speak as representatives of Microsoft willing to own a problem. Now I have seen Microsoft folk distance themselves from the behavior of a supplier, as if they have no say in the matter. And I am bitching about something over which I have no financial engagement. Still, there’s some sort of lesson in here. What Happened: Short VersionSome time before the morning of Monday, January 30, there was an upgrade to the Community Server systems underneath blogs.msdn.com. The update introduced breaking changes to the Atom feeds offered as an alternative to RSS 2.0 feeds. This was noticeable each time there was a new post by an MSDN blogger after the upgrade. The feeds are there, they just fail in NewsGator Outlook 2.0, a very stable and heavily used product. I first noticed this with the blog of Gianpaolo Carraro. I thought the sudden refeeding of all recent articles as empty pages all linked to the top of the blog was a local glitch. As I worked through my morning subscription downloads in Outlook, I observed the same phenomenon with Atom feeds from the prolific posters Raymond Chen, Michael Kaplan, and Larry Osterman. The only blogger who acknowledged there was any disruption was Larry, who posted a mild warning. I adopted a simple remedial strategy. Each time I witnessed a failed Atom subscription in my feed reader, I would delete that subscription, go to the blog site, subscribe to the RSS 2.0 feed that was also available, and then clean-up the duplicates that would show up between my existing organization of subscription folders and the newly-fetched RSS 2.0 material. There would be one or two of these every day as new articles were posted. That is how I ended up converting the feeds from Andy Simonds and Microsoft Team RSS Blog (!), for example. I figured I would just lumber along converting feed subscriptions from Atom to RSS 2.0 as the occasion arose or until the Atom breakage was resolved. The experience had me kvetching about the problems of bullet-proofing software and services that are offered over the web. I commented about that to Larry Osterman, who is the author of (to me) a famous post on Microsoft’s care in preserving APIs and not breaking legacy applications, something Raymond Chen provides great insight into. Unfortunately, I suspect we are seeing a demonstration of what Joel Spolski calls the Raymond Chen Camp vs. MSDN Camp regarding backward compatibility. Enough Is EnoughWell, it didn’t work out as a matter of steady cut-over from Atom to RSS 2.0. There appears to have been further updates to blogs.msdn.com some time last night. It’s now Superbowl Sunday, February 5, and the situation just got nasty. Whatever happened, I am now seeing refeeds of many MSDN Blogs subscriptions, both RSS 2.0 and defective (to my feed reader) Atom ones, whether or not there are new articles. I can’t see any content changes, some of the blogs have been quiet since November, but here are all of these refeeds, marked as unread. I don’t mind the RSS 2.0 refeeds too much, but the Atom ones are useless as received and I have no time to go through the painful conversion process. Since my MSDN blogs subscriptions that use Atom are useless unless I do something, I will take the easy way out: Unsubscribe. So if you make it onto my deletion honor roll, what can I say. Your blog host is making me work too hard to workaround the Atom feed breakage, whatever it is. I’ve got too much to do already, and I need relief. Sorry and Goodbye. The Deletion Honor RollUpdated 2005-02-13: Now that it is easy to hook up the Atom 1.0 (or RSS 2.0) feeds, I am restoring these as time and interest allows.
And because there’s nothing more I need to know about Community Server:
[I haven’t resubscribed to Scott’s blog only because we don’t have that much mutual interest. He is on my good-guy list though.] Comments: Until I deleted the blogs.msdn.com weblogs that I was subscribed to with Atom, I didn't realize how much clutter I had. I may resubscribe in the future, although it will be via a gradual process. As I follow interesting links from other blogs and announcements, if I find something I'd like to have in my archive of weblog articles, I'll resubscribe to the RSS 2.0 feed. This spreads the pain of resubscription of previously Atom-subscribed blogs. I'm still annoyed at how un-naked this process was, and how opaque the arrangement at MSDN Blogs is. |
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