Distractions, reflections

I’ve been thinking that the problems I’ve been having with RSS Bandit reading some Blogspot blogs has to do with the fact that Blogspot (and Blogger) are at Atom 0.3 instead of Atom 1.0. Maybe my initial diagnosis was wrong.

I was trying to find a solution to recommend to some of the bloggers (since they tend to be less technical than me). The blogs where I’ve been having problems (i.e. http://foldsoc.blogspot.com/ and http://adedesigns.blogspot.com/ ) are both from Blogspot, and I’m getting errors in RSS Bandit. To convert Atom feeds into RSS, some bloggers use Feedburner. (I think that this approach is now irrelevant, but it could be a simple solution). I entered a URI into the front page of Feedburner, and got the following error message.  Read more... (349 words, estimated 1:24 mins reading time)

I’m used to reading newsgroups, where the responses are threaded (i.e. appear underneath the main entry).

In RSS Bandit, this feature seems to be on the list for the next release. In the meantime, the solution appears to be twofold:

• On (WordPress, at least) blogs, there’s two feeds: one for posted entries, and one for comments. This means two feeds per blog, for the ones in which I’m really interested.
• There’s a UnconditionalCommentRss feature described in the RSS Bandit Forum, as well as under Bandit Help (under Advanced Topics … Advanced Configuration Topics … Supported Options …). This seems to work on WordPress blogs only (and not Blogspot or Xanga). This doesn’t appear to download all of the comments when the feed is refreshed, but only when selected.

This is a minor temporary shortcoming that I can live with. I’m getting to be a fan of RSS Bandit. One thing I’ve learned, though, is that it’s better to leave the history of entries “marked as read” rather than to delete them. (I guess I’ll worry about space considerations, later.)

I like the Mozilla community. I’ve moved over almost entirely to Firefox — particular, in thanks to IE View, a plug-in that allows me use Firefox for surfing, and then start up another window in IE when the page calls for it. For personal e-mail, I was a long time user of Eudora, but switched over to Thunderbird when it was released.

On my work e-mail on Lotus Notes client, I typically work up against the 3-month expiry deadline, with somewhere between 200 and 300 message in backlog. A lot of these are push e-mail, as subscriptions from magazines such as Business Week and Forbes. (I used to subscribe to the paper editions by mail, but my stack was so huge, I had to do something to simplify my life).

So, with Thunderbird v1.5 supporting RSS, I stopped my e-mail subscriptions . Unfortunately, as I started having problems with the RSS feeds stopping, the clock has been ticking. It’s not absolutely crucial to keep on top of everything, but there doesn’t seem to be much encouragement in terms of movement on Bugzilla. I’m sure they have their plate full.  Read more... (592 words, estimated 2:22 mins reading time)