so this is how the other 92.75394% lives

[waider]

my laptop spent most of this evening in Windows land, partly so that I could update the virus scanner that lives there and partly for some other reason that escapes me. While I was there I played with Firefox and Thunderbird for a bit and installed some extensions to the former. Things that I am noticing as a result of this toolery:

• Thunderbird's RSS reader is pretty damned rough. You can't seem to drag and drop RSS URLs into it or do something like thunderbird <url to rss file>
• Thunderbird needs at least two more display layouts: folder list + message list, and message list. I don't care if this is a "if you want Outlook/Evolution you know where to get them" statement.
• Firebird extensions: good. Restarting to activate them: bad. Inconsistently placed configuration screens: very bad.
• Deepest Sender is nice, but missed the one basic thing I thought was totally the point of browser-embedded web log clients: writing an entry based around the current page. Like, BLOG THIS ALREADY or something.
• The del.icio.us plugin was okayish but needs to be two-way, i.e. rather than just grabbing my stuff off del.icio.us, it should be possible for me to locally frob the del.icio.us folder and have the results mirrored on the site.
• WeatherFox (check the firefox extensions site as I couldn't be bothered digging up the URL again) is neat.

And that is all.

Comments

[suzylou.livejournal.com]

What IS firefox? I've heard the name bandied about but really have no concept of what it actually is...

[waider.livejournal.com]

It's the browser everyone should be using, pretty much. Mozilla with all the fat and slow bits removed. Have a look at the mozilla site. As of last weekend, my mom is running it (and the companion mail client, Thunderbird) and is delighted with it.

[suzylou.livejournal.com]

Thanks...it looks interesting! Might have to have a play this evening... ;)

[matrushkaka.livejournal.com]

I'm using Deepest Sender. What I like about it is the WYSIWYG HTML editing, but it sometimes messes up. For example, sometimes it fucks up the LJ user name tags, and I end up going into the LJ web interface and fixing them myself. Also, I've noticed when I cut and paste text, sometimes the italic or bold buttons won't work on the selected text, and ctrl+i or ctrl+b won't work, either.

Also, Deepest Sender is sorely missing a Spell Check feature.

I like how I can work on a post for a long time and my post is timestamped when I post it. This is useful for people like me who have high-volume Friends pages - when you start a post via the LJ web interface, it posts at the exact time you started the new post, regardless of how long it took you to write it, so your post gets lost behind a bunch of other posts that were sent out minutes or hours after you started your post.

Unfortunately, if I'm working on a post for a while, if I close the Deepest Sender window, it doesn't save my post for re-opening later, so I have to cut and paste it in WordPad to save it.

I'd also like it if they let you post to more than one community simultaneously - sometimes I cross-post, and it would be quicker if I didn't have to do it one at a time.

It just needs a little tweaking, but overall, it's pretty cool.

And yes, I've mentioned all this already on the Deepest Sender developer forums. :)

Interesting about the Thunderbird RSS reader. I haven't seen it yet, but was thinking of downloading it on the computer I'm setting up for my mom so she can get all her news in one place.

[waider.livejournal.com]

I can take or leave WYSIWYG HTML editors. Mostly, I don't want to achieve much beyond occasional emphasis - bold or italics - and I'm kinda anal about using &quot; instead of quotemarks, but I can do all that with a plaintext editor. I tend to rely on my own proofreading for catching typos and spelling errors and largely that's okay; every once in a while I'll invoke my editor's spellcheck function to check one or two words that simply won't stay in my head. For the record, I use emacs with a hacked-up version of the emacs lj client that's mentioned in the "official" list of clients; it's a bit of a dog, but it works well enough that I've only made minor changes to it (grab currently playing music from XMMS or Gronk and ping Technorati are the only two I can think of) and on the whole it functions like my mail client so it's a familiar environment. The only thing I'd really like to add to it is, as I say, a "blog what I'm looking at" hook. I found a Firefox extension to do this, but I've yet to actually try it out.

I looked at the Thunderbird RSS reader a little more. I don't like it. I also tried a Firefox-based RSS reader called Hataru Xenu (I think) and didn't like that either. Am I the only person on the planet who wants my RSS presented like the LJ friends page, i.e. all feeds intermixed chronologically (see my own crufty hack for a rough example) instead of presented as discrete folders?