Reading This Site With NetNewsWire 3
NetNewsWire 3 still has its fans, but unfortunately starting around January 29 it’s not been able to fetch the RSS feed for this site (or for C-Command). My Web server has dropped support for TLS 1.0, and for reasons I don’t understand, it seems that this is what NetNewsWire’s RSS feed downloader wants to use. (Other parts of NetNewsWire, such as its feed auto-detection and its browser seem to be able to use a newer version of TLS.)
However, there’s a workaround. NetNewsWire 3 has a great feature that lets you to subscribe to a script rather than a URL. So you can just create a text file named feed.sh that looks like this:
#!/bin/bash curl https://mjtsai.com/blog/feed/
or like this:
#!/bin/bash curl https://c-command.com/blog/feed/
Then choose File ‣ New Special Subscription ‣ Script… and select the file. When NetNewsWire refreshes the subscription, it will run the script, which uses curl to download the feed.
5 Comments RSS · Twitter
Regarding the TLS version behavior, I would say it's more a mystery how/why the other parts of NetNewsWire do use a newer version of TLS. By default Apple's networking libraries use TLS 1.0 for apps linked against system SDKs of a certain vintage. It's very difficult to work around this limitation in a way that doesn't break connections to servers that don't support newer TLS versions. I know this because I tried to support newer TLS from MarsEdit while it was still linking against 10.6, and it was a nightmare.
I wonder if the WebView somehow configures itself in a way to get newer TLS working. It would make particular sense if it were WebKit 2 running out of a separate process, but given the age of NNW 3 it most certainly is not.
I believe NetNewsWire 3 is a 32 bit application, so the end is nigh. Once Apple discontinues support for 32 bit apps on macOS, it's the end of the line for NNW3.
Thanks for figuring this out. Happy to have it working again.
Looks like I'll lose Twitter soon too, sigh. And with attempting to mostly abandon Facebook, I'm really running out of communication options!
Sad to say that I just noticed that the feed was broken now (it's just been a crazy few months). Thanks for the tip.
