Wednesday, August 18, 2004

Thunderbird I have used the Mozilla application suite for my web browsing needs for as long as I have known about it (almost two years).  Several months ago, I started using the stand-alone browser Firefox.  I have continued to use the suite for my e-mail needs as I've waited for the stand-alone mail client Thunderbird to mature.  I was excited by the news that an rss reader was being added to it.  When I saw that the feature (screenshots) had gone live, I decided to give Thunderbird a try. I downloaded a testing version and installed it.  (If you are wary of things like crashing and data loss, you may want to hold off trying out Thunderbird with the RSS reader until version 0.8 is released.  If you care about stability and want to give it a try immediately (w/o RSS reader), you can download version 0.7.3)  Note that the RSS reader is optional; if you don't want it, you can go without.  As I was looking forward to the feature, I happily installed it. On first startup, the program asks whether you would like to migrate your e-mail messages, preferences, etc. from another program.  I opted to migrate my stuff from Mozilla Mail and Thunderbird did so flawlessly.  Migrating my rss feeds was a bit painful, unfortunately.  Hitherto, I had been using the news aggregator built into Radio Userland.  Radio stores all of my subscriptions as an OPML file.  Had I been able to enter mySubscriptions.opml into Thunderbird as a subscription, the migration would have been near automatic and easy.  As it is, one has to manually add each XML link.  I did that, somewhat unhappily.  I can't imagine many people (especially those with a lot of RSS feeds) being as patient and dilligent as I was in transferring my subscriptions. Other than that, I have no complaints and I strongly recommend Thunderbird.  If you aren't using any Mozilla products, then you are missing out on a great experience. NOTE:  My blogroll used to be based off my mySubscriptions.opml file.  I transferred it to BlogRolling.com (which allowed input of an opml file) and now use BlogRolling for the blogroll displayed on the side (BlogRolling allows the option of outputting as an OPML file, so it was a mere matter of replacing the link to mySubscriptions.opml with a link to the OPML file generated by BlogRolling.com).  Very painless. Jackpotzrebie comment []5:21:52 AM   trackback []