in Uncategorized |

RSS and OS X Mountain Lion

I made the jump yesterday, and discovered to my (unhappy) surprise about how Mountain Lion now handles RSS.

Or, more precisely, how it *doesn’t*. RSS is no longer supported in either Mail.app or in Safari.

After reading a bit, I decided to try out Reeder. Nice program, but it has an unfortunate (fatal) flaw: It doesn’t import RSS from Mail.app.

Since I happen to be good with the command line, I shortly came up with a method to extract the RSS feeds. This is a 90% in that the results that it prints have some encoding (such as & for an ampersand.) I’ll post later a 100% solution.

This solution may or may not work with Safari RSS feeds. I’ll post if I see a solution for Safari.

To extract your RSS feeds:

  1. Run Terminal.app (or any other command line terminal). Terminal.app can be found under your dock at: Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal.app
  2. Make sure a terminal window is open. In Terminal.app, the following menu option will open a new terminal window for you: Shell -> New Window -> Basic
  3. Copy and past the following into a terminal window:
find ~/Library/Mail/V2/RSS -name "*.plist" -print0 | xargs -0 grep -hA 1 RSSFeedURLString | grep "<string>" | sed -e 's/.<string>//' -e 's/<\/string>$//'

You’ll now have a list of RSS feeds. Enjoy!

—-

Edited to fix accidental change in the command line.

Published

Write a Comment

Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

  1. Worked great! I redirected to a file and now I can update my new RSS Reader.

    But now I have a question. When I go to any web site that has a RSS icon and I select it, Mountain Lion tries to push it to Mail and Mail just gives me an error. How do I stop that? It would be nice if it pushed it to NewsBar.app too.

    Reply

    greenman Reply:
    July 27th, 2012 at 19:17

    You can try this, but I won’t guarantee that it’ll work for you.

    Open up a Terminal.app window and type: touch ~/Desktop/test.rss

    Navigate to that file (which will be on your desktop) and control-click on it. Select the “Open with >” option, and choose “Other…” at the bottom of the list. You’ll need to “enable:” “All Applications” instead of “Recommended Applications”, and click the “Always Open With” check box.

    Once you’ve done that, scroll through the list above & select your RSS reader. Click open.

    Your RSS reader will probably complain about the file being invalid, but that’s OK.

    Now try adding an RSS feed.

    HTH,
    -Ian

    Reply

    greenman Reply:
    July 27th, 2012 at 19:18

    Oh, and when you’re done, you don’t need to keep the test.rss file around.

    Reply