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I use NetNewsWire (currently Pro betas, though I use absolutely zero of the "Pro" features except for the expanded information available in the article listings) to stay in touch with, oh, 100 blogs or so. I use NNW to locate articles I'd like to read, and because I'm never 100% sure that the "description" being shown is the full article, I often like to visit the article at the author's "actual" blog (Web site).

Unfortunately, as far as I'm concerned, Radio blogs are "broken." They "don't work." Their XML feeds contains only a <link> attribute that the blog author can apparently set to link to some external link. I say external because though Radio blogs have permalinks, they are created dynamically when the article is posted - the author can't link to their own article unless they go back and edit their post once they know the URL.

That sucks. Another "note of suckiness" with Radio blogs? Their formatting is entirely lost in the <description>. Bill Bumgarner posts paragraphs of text, yet his entries show up as a single paragraph in NNW. Is it an NNW problem? I guess Dave and Brent can argue that one out. All I know is that "it's broken" and that the issue seems to only really occur with Radio blogs.

I hope I'm proven or shown wrong on this one. I hope there's a way to return the functionality I expect to my NNW and Radio experience(s). Maybe I'm using too small a sample. Maybe Bill, for example, is using an older XML template or something. Maybe… I hope.

(P.S. An update: Dave posted this note on his blog. Apparently Radio users must update their own RSS feeds to include some of this information and formatting - stuff I'd consider pretty basic, really. But as a Radio user for three minutes once, I don't have the time or inclination to figure it out. "Not My Problem" as they say.)

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