Sam will be offline until September 3rd

problem
#1

Hey, everyone, I sent an email to Sam alerting him about the problems we’ve all been facing. Here’s his out-of-office message, verbatim:

"Thank you for your email! I’m taking my only offline vacation of the year and it’s right at the end of the summer. I’m out of town with no access to the Internet until September 3rd. I’ll try to get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks for your patience.

Sam"

11 Likes
#2

Wow, if he didn’t leave somebody else with the keys in case of emergency, this is a colossal screw up

#3

I use this tool for work. Not sure how I can compensate for its failure and get the rest of my work done. I chose NEWSBLUR because it was a paid service.

#4

:frowning:

Damn. Newblur works perfectly for me. Been trying feedly this morning and I miss newsblur… but my feeds are an important piece of my professional day, so…

#5

Yeah, this is pretty frustrating for a paid service. On the plus side, you can actually manually cause feeds to update by clicking them, then refreshing the page. It’ll have the right count. If you don’t have too many feeds, or if you know certain ones update way more than others, then that isn’t *too* cumbersome. But certainly not ideal.

#6

Well… if I run into him at Burning Man, I’ll tell him to get online and fix it asap! :wink:

(Totally kidding. While I AM going again this year, I have no idea what Sam looks like.)

#7

Though someone said in another support post that it’s his provider doing some infrastructure updates and turning off events; hopefully that means that once they’re done everything will go back to normal.

#8

Here you go http://www.newsblur.com/about :stuck_out_tongue:

#9

Hey, yeah, why isn’t Shiloh taking action? Many of us pay for his dog food, dammit!

#10

Yes. Sam definitely deserves a vacation, but he’s running a paid service and needs to have some plan in place to cover Murphy’s Law kicking in – which it apparently has.

#11

This worked for me! Thanks for the suggestion!

#12

It does seem to help. I had to delete everything before importing it (otherwise it imported everything weird) but most of the feeds did get updated.

Not all, and there’s no telling if they’ll go back to auto-updating, but it’s something.

#13

Where’s the option to do this? Do they continue updating? I clicked through all my feeds earlier and that jogged them, but didn’t didn’t continue updating.

#14
  1. Look for the option wheel (cog) in the lower left corner
  2. Open it and click on Account
  3. Find “Backup Your Sites”
  4. Click Download OPML and save the file somewhere you’ll remember
  5. Exit that box (click outside of it)
  6. (Christopher didn’t say to do this, but I had to) Delete your existing feeds (easiest to just delete the top folders)
  7. Click on the cog again
  8. Click on Import or Upload Sites
  9. Click “Upload OPML File” and select the file you downloaded
  10. Done (click outside the box or keep clicking “Skip this step”)

They don’t seem to continue updating; you might be able to force an update with the Insta-Fetch Stories option you find by clicking the arrow to the left of each feed (NOT folders!) This seems to be pretty hit-or-miss, and you’ll have to click on another feed and back to see any new stories.

#15

Well, I wonder what and who will be left when he returns. Leaving for two weeks with apparently zero contingency plan seems reckless and totally inconsiderate of the people that pay to use the service

#16

Thank you very much! I also noticed that when I clicked through all my feeds earlier, they updated but didn’t keep doing so, but if I browse using “All Site Stories”, the feed of all of my feeds does update, so that’s a plus for me at least

#17

Seriously? This is a PAID service. Everyone needs a holiday, but a paid service also needs someone on call. Leaving for two weeks with no-one to mind the store is just unprofessional and irresponsible. Much as I love NewsBlur, I’ll seriously be rethinking my newsreader options. Totally unacceptable business practice.

1 Like
#18

Agreed. I find this frustrating, but it’s not a critical thing for me and I’ve had no problem with Newsblur up to this point. I also find it to be feature rich for the price.

If it stays broken until Sept 3rd I might consider switching, but if it’s a few days and he details how he’ll avoid this problem (the lack of communication/contingency) in the future once he’s back from vacation then all is forgiven (hopefully he’ll toss in a free month to subscribers for the trouble.)

#19

I wrote this in the other thread too. I’m using Newsblur and Inoreader for some time and I’m almost fully migrated to the latter. I’m glad I did more research in the past, because Inoreader turned out not only more robust and packed with features, but a lot more stable too. Just check out this recent review. It says almost everything - http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/inoreade…

2 Likes
#20

Of the alternatives I’ve been trying today, this one really does seem to have the most potential.