Thunderbird RSS Feed Fix

Thunderbird RSS Feed Fix

I love Thunderbird for reading emails, and keeping track of my RSS feeds.

But for some reason RSS tends to become corrupted. I don’t believe it’s necessarily Thunderbird’s fault, although it seems a bit pickier about feeds that are correctly crafted then other RSS readers.

A clue that there is a problem is RSS feeds simply stop receiving any new messages. When looking at the feed it appears that it is no longer subscribed. Deleting the feed and resubscribing fails with a message stating that the feed is already subscribed.

In cases like this the only fix seems to be to manually delete the feed.

In Windows do this by going to: C:Documents and SettingsUserNameApplication DataThunderbirdProfileswsfdfsgb.defaultMailFeeds

The part after profiles, in this case wsgjbxgb.default, will be different on each machine. In some cases there might even be two files that both have .default in them. If so, the newest one is usually correct.

On Macintosh, these files are located in /Users/username/Library/Thunderbird/profiles/wsfdfsgb.default/Mail/News & Blogs/

Once in the correct folder, simply delete all files with the name of the site that you’re pulling feeds from. Note that this will also delete any saved articles you might have kept, so be sure to back those up within Thunderbird.

After deleting the files, restart Thunderbird and re-add the feeds. Everything should be working now!

 

Web Comics to read

Web Comics to read

Here is a list of my favorite Web Comics to read. Split into those “with an RSS feed” and those “without an RSS feed (that I can find)”

With RSS Feed:
Air Force Blues
Astray3
Boxcar Astronaut
Dilbert
Evil Inc.
The Rainbow Orchid
Gene’s Journal
Erf World
Order of the Stick
Gill
Girl Genius
Schoolhouse Daze
Imagine This
Imy
Lackadaisy Cats
Least I Could Do (Not safe for work!)
Legend of Bill
Lovecraft is Missing
Penny Arcade
Pinkerton
PvPonline
The System
Schlock Mercenary
Sheldon
Shi Long Pang
Something Positive (Not safe for work!)
Starslip
The Super Fogeys
VG Cats(Not safe for work!) (Sometimes)
Weregeek
xkcd

Without an RSS Feed (that I can find):
Real Life
Tales from the White Pony
Dungeons and Denizens
Chicken Wings
CTRL+ALT+DEL
Sorcery 101
8 Bit Theater
Goblins
Giselle
Realm of Atland
Strip Tease
Girls with Slingshots
Multiplex
Good Ship Chronicles
Jump Leads
Menage a 3 (Not work safe!!!!)
The Zombie Hunters
Dork Tower
Wayfarer’s Moon
Galaxion
Looking For Group
Nodwick
Full Frontal Nerdity
Ps238

How to: Add RSS to Blogspot

How to: Add RSS to Blogspot

Really Simple Syndication feeds or RSS is one of those technologies that makes sense when you think about it, but just isn’t as widely used as it should be.

As a blogger, I too at one time went with Blogspot/Google/Blogger to do my thing. One of the things that made me move to WordPress, and an independent site, was the lack of a simple way to create RSS feeds.

Since then, Blogspot has seen the problem and fixed it. Take the address of the site you want to use and add /atom.xml to the end of the address.

So http://ricksawesomeblog.blogspost.com becomes http://ricksawesomeblog.blogspost.com/atom.xml

Take the new line, insert into your RSS reader and you’re good to go!

The feed for this humble blog is a tiny bit more complicated http://hamell.net/?feed=rss2, but readers are welcomed, and hopefully informed.