I've heard excellent things about Viigo, so I decided to give it a try to replace FreeRange (the free version maxes out at 10 feeds and has one minor issue with caching full feeds when I don't what it to).

However, I've had a few problems with Viigo that make me wonder what all the fuss is about.

The most significant one is that auto update doesn't appear to work very well. To be specific, it does auto update. However, it only updates some of the feeds. And within some feeds, it only gets some of the articles. If I manually "Update All," I get the same result: very little gets updated. Either a feed is missed or only a subset of the articles are retrieved. If I open the feed and "Update" only that feed, it brings in all the articles. So, I have to select each feed individually to get the full update.

This alone seems like a major problem. Am I the only one experiencing this?

My other problem is that I have a feed or two were I can't retrieve full articles. If I try, I get "Unable to fetch the full article. The publisher may have deleted the article. Please try again later. Too many redirections."

When I reporting this issue to Viigo, they told me that it was unlikely to be a valid feed and directed me to w3c.org's validator. To be specific, they simply sent me the FAQ text, verbatim. I tried the validator and it said the feed was good. I already knew that, since I get the feed. The problem is with the full article links. Which are also valid, by the way.

Anyone know what this error means? FreeRange has no problems with it. Neither does any other reader I've tried. This is the first time I've seen this, so it's exclusive to Viigo. Other than opening each item in the BB browser, anything I can do to fix?

I'm most likely going back to FreeRange and living with the 10 feed limit (the price for more feeds is high, since it's a yearly fee) and my one very minor issue. Otherwise, it's been fine.

As for Viigo, other than its ability to easily find and add feeds and its alert functionality, it seems to be a lesser product that FreeRange. Which makes me wonder why so many people love it. The fact that it has a major issue with updating feeds and cannot deal with certain feed's full articles means that it's got major problems that are halting my consideration of the product.

Please, someone, tell me that it isn't so... that there's a fix for the update problems and the full article problems.

Thanks.

P.S. I downloaded two days ago, so I do have the latest version.

Himm, interesting issue,

by the way, I have another question. How do you pronounce "VIIGO" ?

I noticed your first issue for the first time the other day. I don't do auto updates and instead close viigo when I'm using it; but it downloads updates when it is launched. The other day I noticed it wasn't updating all the feeds, and I would get the feeds when I manually updated the given channel.

I also noticed you second issue with a new feed I added. Got the "publisher may have deleted the article" message. I figured it was the feed as it was the only one doing this, and I removed it.

FWIW.

As per the company's web site, it's "Vee-go."

never noticed this as I only have a few feeds and they all update

Wirelessly posted (Verizon 8830)

I think with Free Range, you cant e-mail articles. I think that is why I went with "Vee-go."
I tend to get the feeds from daily subscriptions but not weekly.

Free Range does include e-mailing. In fact, it has so many options for e-mail that I can't figure out how they differ from each other.

Thats how they pronounce it at CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership too (watch the vid if you care to know).

Ontopic:
Could it be that viigo only gets some feeds cuz its supposed to get used to your preferences? Similar to how TiVo works? Just how I understood it, never actually used it, forgive me if that's total BS.

There are settings for max number of articles it pulls per individual feed and overall, you might want to mess around with that and see if that helps. If you have a feed that gets a ton of articles, raise the individual and maybe the overall as well.

Thanks for the idea. I tried this, but it doesn't work. It's not a matter of the feed hitting the max articles (or hitting the maximum total articles). I can still manually do a feed-by-feed update and it works. It's just that "Update All" doesn't.

I know from my experience that when the article total is maxed out (mine is set to 500 for overall articles) the new articles in some feeds fall behind and I will have some feeds that aren't updated since the day before. I usually just go through a bunch of the feeds and remove older articles (using delete prior) and then when I do 'update all', it pulls in the newer articles for those feeds that fell behind.

My Viigo works great. I have about 20 feeds and they update throughout the day with no issues.

Wirelessly posted

Viigo posted this on their Viigo Bulletins feed:

"Some of our BlackBerry users have informed us that their network connections with the Viigo server are ‘Timing Out’, resulting in the inability to Update Channels and Add New Channels, etc. While this doesn’t happen very often, it can prove to be a frustrating experience.The workaround for this is really simple: Manually close Viigo, by clicking the menu button and selecting ‘close’. Then reopen Viigo by clicking the Viigo icon in the BlackBerry home screen. This will reestablish a new connection with our server.We’re currently working on developing improvements for this issue in an upcoming release – and wanted to share a simple workaround with you in the meantime.Thanks,Team Viigo"