InvalidUrl Error retrieving feed when using FeedDemon

This falls into the category of so obvious you kick yourself once you understand it. At least I did.

Every now and again I do a little more work on an intranet website that I maintain. For some time I've been trying to integrate some blogging functionality using BlogEngine.NET. The RSS feed for it worked ok from Outlook but every time I tried to add a subscription to it from FeedDemon I got a warning about the URL maybe being inaccessible from NewsGator which I promptly ignored and then I got an error like this:

"InvalidUrl Error retrieving feed"

I was tearing my hair out thinking it was some kind of incompatibility between the feeds generated by BlogEngine.NET and FeedDemon. As often happens I jumped to the conclusion that it was some really nasty, gnarly bug/issue that I had run into.

But I finally realised today what was going on.

Let's just pause to think about what NewsGator is. It's an online RSS reader and the plus point of using it in conjunction with FeedDemon is that wherever you use your reader from, be it desktop machine, laptop etc, your feeds are always up to date as is the read/unread status of individual posting etc. But obviously to do this NewsGator has to be able to access the feed, from the Internet. Oh wait, I'm adding a feed for my intranet site. DOH! That's not going to work.

So the solution is of course to simply add the subscription in FeedDemon to a folder (e.g. "Intranet blogs") where the option to synchronize with NewsGator is unchecked.

I guess the message bog could be a little more explanatory.

HTH

Doug