How to See What Happened with the Activity Log

On your Mac, choose Window > Activity Log to open the window. You’ll see something like this:

Screenshot of the Activity Log window

On iOS (TBD…)

(The Activity Log feature was added in NetNewsWire 7.1, released in July 2026.)

What Happened

The Activity Log is all about things that happen over the web — downloading feeds, syncing statuses, looking for feed images, and so on.

It gives you more information than just that it tried a thing: it says what the result is.

For instance, an error downloading a feed might look like this:

[2026-06-07 12:12:02] x On My Mac: Refreshing feed: NetNewsWire https://netnewswire.blog/feed.json — A TLS error caused the secure connection to fail.

Another feed download might be skipped due to the app respecting Cache-Control headers:

[2026-06-07 12:21:43] ✓ iCloud: Refreshing feed: Unsung https://unsung.aresluna.org/feed.xml — Skipped — Cache-Control, ready at 1:59 PM

An iCloud status sync activity will report on number of changed and deleted items:

[2026-06-07 11:57:43] ✓ iCloud: Refreshing statuses - Fetching status and content changes #12 (0.00s) — 3 changed, 2 deleted

A Feedly refresh will report on the number of articles downloaded:

[2026-06-07 12:12:02] ✓ Feedly: Refresh all (0.97s) — 11 articles downloaded

Whenever you think the app isn’t doing what you expect, you can check this log and find out exactly what it’s doing.

Note that the log doesn’t keep everything forever — it has a 1,000 line limit. It also doesn’t preserve the log between launches of the app.

Tip: Find

On Mac, type cmd-F to open the Find bar and search within the log.

Also Useful

Current Activity shows exactly what’s happening right now.

The Error Log lists recent errors with additional detail.