There’s a long trail on how I got to this point.
Continue reading “Graduating from a hosted blog to an independent blog“
There’s a long trail on how I got to this point.
Continue reading “Graduating from a hosted blog to an independent blog“
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.
So, I started search around again for another newsreader, … and ended up choosing RSS Bandit. There are a number of reasons for this:
I’ve already done some “weird” customization of RSS Bandit that I may not ever be able to do on Thunderbird. I’ve moved one of the menu bars (so that it’s easy to get to “next unread’ and “mark unread”) from the top of the page, to the right side. In addition, I’ve positioned the reading pane at the top, and list of headlines at the bottom, so my eye doesn’t have to move so much when I switch from reading one article to another. So far, it looks like subscribing to audio (i.e. podcasts) works, too.
I had complained that tabbed messaging would have been nice in Thunderbird, and it’s already a feature of RSS Bandit . RSS Bandit seems to be usable a browser by itself — I’m not sure how it does this, but pages look fine. On newsfeeds (e.g. Business Week), Thunderbird use to render a full web page, whereas RSS Bandit seems to focus on just the text. Is this because RSS Bandit has actually downloaded and cached the pages, whereas Thunderbird would just load the page dynamically?
The immediate crisis of dropped subscriptions is over, so I’ll have to see how I like RSS Bandit. One thing that bugs me is to have yet another application open on my desktop — Lotus Notes, Thunderbird, Sametime, AIM, MSN Messenger and Skype are just the beginning before I actually do any work! — but maybe that’s what the operating system is for.
This led to the entry on Bugzilla, where it seems to be on a slow path to repair.
I haven’t quite given up, yet, but will let this stew for a few days ….
Forbes had pointed out some internal messages from Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie on the “services wave” in software. Ray wrote:
RSS is the internet’s answer to the notification scenarios we’ve discussed and worked on for some time, and is filling a role as ‘the UNIX pipe of the internet’ as people use it to connect data and systems in unanticipated ways.
In the movement away from a small number of news sources to the larger world of self-publishing in blogs, RSS seems to be more reasonable in handling pull technologies.