NetNewsWire: Open Source RSS Reader for Mac

COLLECTED BY

Organization: Archive Team

Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.

History is littered with hundreds of conflicts over the future of a community, group, location or business that were "resolved" when one of the parties stepped ahead and destroyed what was there. With the original point of contention destroyed, the debates would fall to the wayside. Archive Team believes that by duplicated condemned data, the conversation and debate can continue, as well as the richness and insight gained by keeping the materials. Our projects have ranged in size from a single volunteer downloading the data to a small-but-critical site, to over 100 volunteers stepping forward to acquire terabytes of user-created data to save for future generations.

The main site for Archive Team is at archiveteam.org and contains up to the date information on various projects, manifestos, plans and walkthroughs.

This collection contains the output of many Archive Team projects, both ongoing and completed. Thanks to the generous providing of disk space by the Internet Archive, multi-terabyte datasets can be made available, as well as in use by the Wayback Machine, providing a path back to lost websites and work.

Our collection has grown to the point of having sub-collections for the type of data we acquire. If you are seeking to browse the contents of these collections, the Wayback Machine is the best first stop. Otherwise, you are free to dig into the stacks to see what you may find.

The Archive Team Panic Downloads are full pulldowns of currently extant websites, meant to serve as emergency backups for needed sites that are in danger of closing, or which will be missed dearly if suddenly lost due to hard drive crashes or server failures.

Collection: ArchiveBot: The Archive Team Crowdsourced Crawler

ArchiveBot is an IRC bot designed to automate the archival of smaller websites (e.g. up to a few hundred thousand URLs). You give it a URL to start at, and it grabs all content under that URL, records it in a WARC, and then uploads that WARC to ArchiveTeam servers for eventual injection into the Internet Archive (or other archive sites).

To use ArchiveBot, drop by #archivebot on EFNet. To interact with ArchiveBot, you issue commands by typing it into the channel. Note you will need channel operator permissions in order to issue archiving jobs. The dashboard shows the sites being downloaded currently.

There is a dashboard running for the archivebot process at http://www.archivebot.com.

ArchiveBot's source code can be found at https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/ArchiveBot.

TIMESTAMPS

The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20190519054016/https://ranchero.com/netnewswire/

NetNewsWire More news, less junk. Faster.

NetNewsWire 5.0 is a free and open source feed reader for macOS.

It’s so basic it’s not even funny. By design.

It’s usable, but it’s not actually shipping. Especially important: it doesn’t have syncing yet (we’re working on that right now).

Nevertheless, you can:

To Do

The 5.0 alpha milestone — which will be reached when the app is feature-complete — has a few bugs and one big feature: syncing. In 5.0 the app will sync with FeedBin. (Later releases will add other services.)

A few notes about the future:

We might do an iOS version. Concentrating on Mac first.
We don’t plan on making a for-pay version ever. This app is written for love, not money.
Future versions will add syncing via existing services (such as FeedBin, Feedly, Feed Wrangler, and others), though we make no promises about which ones and when. (This means that, some time in the future, you could use NetNewsWire on your Mac and Unread, Reeder, or other feed reader on your iPhone and iPad.)

Technical Notes

NetNewsWire supports RSS, Atom, JSON Feed, and RSS-in-JSON.

NetNewsWire requires macOS 10.14.

About Using the Code

You’re free to use the code and make your own app, even on iOS. It’s MIT-licensed. Just give us credit and call it something besides NetNewsWire.

In fact, please do use any or all of this code. If you can learn from it — things to do or things not to do — then great! Creating a full-featured example Mac app of use to other developers is one of our goals.

Most of the code is written in Swift. Some older parts, particularly in the frameworks, are written in Objective-C. We think this is one of the largest open source Mac apps written mostly in Swift.

NetNewsWire History

The app was started in 2002. After a couple acquisitions, it returned to its original home — right here — on August 31, 2018.

How to contact us

You can reach the developer @brentsimmons on Micro.blog, make bugs and feature requests on the bug tracker, or send email to Brent Simmons (brent at the domain for this site).