Until December, I used NewsGator to read feeds within Outlook. I'd used the tool for about two years and loved it, even more so when I started grouping feeds into categories/folders.  However, I had to bail out over its failure to properly sync feeds. I jumped instead to RSS Bandit, and I'm going to write about my viewing habits and making feeds portable in that later. But first, my obituary for NewsGator.

Those who use NewsGator might think I'm insane to think it can't sync well. After all, you can have it watch what you read and mirror that online, or with your work computer, or your PDA or whatever. NewsGator Online allows you to have a number of profiles.

I'm talking about a different type of syncing, one I'm realizing seems completely overlooked. I want to sync between different computers, and I want those computers to know locally -- on the hard drive -- exactly what I've saved or seen on the other one and with feeds categorized exactly how I've organized them.

In particular, my problem comes as part of travel. Most of the time, I'm on my desktop at home. Then I head off on a trip for a week or two. With NewsGator, I'd copy over my Outlook PST file from my desktop to my laptop. Then all hell would break lose. It wouldn't have a record of all my feeds. If it did, it wouldn't put them in the right place or from where I left off reading from before. And no end of syncing with NewsGator Online seemed to help.

Here's my message from last October to NewsGator support that explains the problem more:

Honestly, I love NewsGator, but I'm finding it maddening that there's no way to keep my folders set for delivery when moving between machines.

Here's the deal. I have about 9 folders, and I route different feeds into each folder. I have about 100 feeds in all. When I'm on my desktop, everything's fine.

Now I move to my laptop. I copy my Outlook PST file over and open it up there. NewsGator then often loses track of where feeds are supposed to be delivered. I've just spent the last 1/2 hour doing them over again.

I've looked in the forums but haven't seen this addressed. If I missed it, I apologize. But basically, I want a bulletproof way that everything is remembered.

I also strongly dislike two way synchronization. Time and again, NewsGator Online has tried to restore a feed I deleted and put it in the wrong place. I have to leave sync off because of this.

Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated.

When I got back from the trip that prompted that message, I manually reworked everything. Then before my next trip last December, I made sure that I had the same version of NewsGator on both machines, which was the initial advice. No luck. Things got messed up again, and so I wrote:

Coming back to this because once again, Newsgator has screwed everything up, on both my desktop and my laptop now. Arrgh!

Yes, I have [the same] version on both my desktop and laptop.

Here's the deal. Again, I have about 120 feeds. There are (were) organized into about nine different folders.

Today, I'm going on a trip. So I copy my Outlook PST file over to my laptop. I open it up. It knows where I want most of the feeds to go because the last time I was on a trip, everything screwed up, and I had to do this by hand.

It doesn't know any of my new feeds since my last trip. So, I do an OPML import. Now it sees double feeds, some showing base folders, some showing proper locations.

OK, so I delete all the base folder duplicates, which should just leave me with about 10 new feeds that aren't a problem to assign manually.

Instead, it suddenly knocks EVERY feed into the base folder. Damn. Damn, damn, damn. Now I'm back to square one.

One last change. I go to the desktop computer. I sync with NewsGator Online to my Desktop profile, overwriting online. Hopefully, my folder locations will carry across, and then I can sync with the laptop and overwrite the laptop settings. Nope. Maybe five of the feeds go into the right folder and the rest don't.

I try a few more types trying to sync. All that happens is somehow, someway, now my desktop loses its settings (even though I specifically disable sync as soon as I do an export across to online.

I'm heading off on my trip. I'm going to spend probably an hour fixing the mess on my laptop and getting everything right. Then I'll be back next Friday, Dec. 8, to work on my desktop again.

Can you please, please, please figure out how I bulletproof get my feeds plus folder locations out of my laptop and into my desktop outlook setup.

This is so crucial, so annoying, and if I don't get a solution, I'm going to leave Newsgator for something else. I hate to do that, because I love how I can have different feeds flow into different folders. I just sang your praises to all my readers about this when I was looking at the Yahoo Mail RSS setup. But I simply cannot keep going through this madness. Somewhere there must be something on my machine that stores these folder locations. If not, Newsgator has got to create a solid import export feature that captures both feeds and folder locations.

Please, please look into this.

There was advice waiting for me when I got back from my trip. I'll reprint it below unless other NewsGator users want to try it:

It looks like we have a fairly complicated situation here, but with a little modification we should be able to get everything working.

The following steps are a brute-force approach but should end up with the results you need.

1) Turn off synching on both your Laptop and Desktop (I assume that's already done since you mentioned it in your post)

2) Make sure you have a different PST for news on both machines (You don't want to be copying the PST across, so if your news feeds are currently in the same PST as your mail you will want to put them into a separate one)

3) Log onto your NewsGator Online account. Click the "Organize Folders" link, and make sure that the folder structure is the way you would like it to appear in your computers.

4) On both your computer go to NewsGator | Subscriptions... and delete all your feeds (Since you are not synched this won't effect your Online Account)

5) On both your computers delete any current feed folders that you have.

6) On your desktop turn synch back on. When the wizard prompts for machine name enter:
Outlook-Desktop

7) Select "Replace local with the Online subscriptions"

8) Go to the "Folders" tab and make sure that your base folder is in your new PST and that you have "Automatic" selected. (For now, you can change this later if needs be)

9) Go to NewsGator | Subscriptions... highlight all your feeds, hold -Ctrl- & -Shift- and click [Retrieve].

At this point your NewsGator Outlook folder structure should be the same as online. It is important that you leave Synch turned on. If you turn it off then NewsGator goes to the source feed instead of NewsGator Online and it may consider it a different feed and mess with your folders! If NG is trying to replace a feed you have deleted then that is a separate issue and we should be able to fix that.

11) On your laptop turn synch back on. When the wizard prompts for machine name enter:
Outlook-laptop

12) Repeat steps 7-9 on the laptop.

I hope this helps, please let me know if you have any trouble.

For me, it seemed far too much to do, especially when I wasn't sure it would necessarily work. It's not portable. I want one single file that knows everything that I can move around. That's portable.

As it happened, I was at the London Geek Dinner the day after my trip and talking with someone about how he reads feeds. He used RSS Bandit. So rather than try to make things work, I started off fresh with RSS Bandit. I haven't looked back. I'll talk about making feeds portable between machines in that, plus how it has changed my reading habits, in future posts.

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