News reader rant

This isn't going to be a sparkling piece of analysis; it's a rant.

Let me say this at the outset: I love NetNewsWire Lite, the excellent free newsreader from the folks at Newsgator. It handles secure news feeds, it lets me group the hundreds of feeds I subscribe to, it's fast, it's free and it syncs with the Newsgator online reader so that I can read my feeds from both my MacBook or my iPhone.

Some rant, huh? Well here it comes. You see, NNW lets me sort the messages in my feeds in several ways. I can set them to be ordered by title, source or arrival order. I don't see why anyone would want them sorted by anything but arrival order, but, to each his own.

Now, it's super convenient to change the sort order. Just like any other Mac application, all I have to do is click on the column heading to sort by that column. But... there's no column to display arrival time!!! In other words, if I want my news to display in arrival order (with the newest on top) I need to set that in a menu. But, in order to set it to sort by any other value, all I have to do is click on the screen. Which I do. Often. By mistake. A lot. Grrrrr.

It's super-easy to set the sort to the wrong preference and super-difficult to set it to the right one. WHY?!

Update on the move

People have asked, so here are some details:

  •  We're moving the operation to Dreamhost, where Seth has a number of other projects hosted. They have a good track record and we're happy with them.
  • The new site is up and running and we're waiting for the domain transfer to happen. If you're just that curious, you can see evidence here.
  • No, you can't get in early. :)
  • Once we finalize things (sometime next week), a post will be made here at the temporary site letting you know that you can return to our original URL. Seth assures me that all of the content (including comments) will travel. Keep your fingers crossed.
  • As much as we had hoped to avoid it, it looks like the new site will have some advertising, in an attempt to cover some of the cost of keeping the lights on. If you know of any sponsorship opportunities, hold on to them until next week.
  • We have not made any final decisions regarding the design of the new site. Keep the suggestions coming!

Another free iPhone update

If you recall, a while back, I made an offer to give away a free iPhone in an attempt to test the "free iPhone giveaway service." I eventually canceled the game because not enough people were involved... but I just checked and there are at least twice as many participants now, so I might as well re-open the offer.

Read the original post for the details... and remember that you must complete an offer. Only one person has successfully done that so far! Here is our current status:

phonestatus.png

New, temporary diggs

We've created a temporary home for ourselves here at WordPress.com, a great place to set up a free weblog. WordPress is the blog software that we use for MacMove so it only seemed fitting to keep things in the family. We're going to stay here for a while, until we can get things set up at our new webhost. As long as you remember to come here, you will stay on top of everything MacMove-related.

Welcome... what do you think of the theme? When we move to our new, permanent home, a redesign is in order. You like this template?

Going dark

So, in case you haven't figured it out, things have stalled here at MacMove. The site began thanks to great initiative by Mike Wendland, continued with the help of Eric and Seth and now, sadly, I find myself here alone. I'm simply too busy with personal issues to keep up regular posting and, rather than let things sit and get dusty, I'm inclined to shut the site down.

Anyone care?

If you have an opinion, a suggestion or anything at all to say, please do so in the comments. If the discussion is as empty as I expect it will be, I will assume that most of our readers have moved on to some of the other excellent Mac news sites.

**Update**: Well, there are at least six of you reading. :)

Thanks to everyone who commented and sent in emails, it's good to know that people care. I understand that people find the site helpful and it's encouraging to find out that people think our archives are so helpful. The site will stay here for a while and I'm going to think about options to keep things going.

One commenter suggested aiming for just one opinion piece per week, which I could probably swing, and another suggested allowing user-submitted content. Anyone interested enough (and willing enough) to volunteer to help out?

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