The promise of feed in Thunderbird
The title is a riddle. Remove the conjunctions and you have some key words. Like a newspaper quiz, re-mash those words. It should read: “Thunderbird promises better adaptabilty of XML feeds to normal people accustomed to a familiar interface: their email client.”
Thunderbird 1.5 was released this week. I’ve been eagerly waiting for it, as it promised some major improvements from its predecessor version 1.0.x. My point of interest in Thunderbird is not in its e-mail handling capabilities—that it does exceptionally well—but in its improved feed handling capability. I’m not sure if this is the first software to combine e-mail, newsgroup and RSS handling into one package. And it works great. With one client, you can now check your e-mail, read and write to your regular newsgroup haunts and read your favorite blogs and newspapers.
With better RSS or XML feed handling capabilities, Thunderbird aims high in trying to bring feeds to the masses in a package they’re familiar with: the e-mail software. And, it is so transparent that ordinary people would not be able to make much of a distinction between an e-mail received and an RSS syndicated post in Thunderbird. They’d read a weblog or a news post just like they would read their e-mail. Remember the phrase by the renaissance man? “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”. Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. And, Mozilla team seems to be getting it right.
The interface is still a little crufty. During a feed subscription, for example, when you click on the import button, you expect for that OK button and you’re not sure what happened. But, Thunderbird invisibly pulls all your feeds from your OPML file and stacks them alphabetically. Click on Get mail to receive all the RSS content as well. One catch though, especially for the bandwidth limited tough-luck folks (obviously those on dial-ups): the syndicate—by default—loads the web page within the read window instead of the summary or the full post in plain text that we are familiar with while reading in an RSS reader or an RSS service (like Bloglines). To have hyperlinked plain text as in RSS feeds, you’ll need to either set this individually to each RSS feed subscribed, or better, right-click on RSS and Blogs folder, select Properties and put a check mark on “By default, show the article summary instead of loading the web page.” This option had me stumped initially, because I didn’t want a stripped down couple of lines summary, but a full post. I realized later that summary means summay or full post as per how feeds are available, and not the short summary of the post itself.
If you have an older generation whose exclusive online content only seems to be via e-mail, then you’d find it awesomely easy to get them to read your blog via Thunderbird, without learning anything new. They’d read your post as if you had written an email to them directly. Sweet.
If my mom can comfortably use Thunderbird to read my blog and the BBC, so can your folks, and anyone who’s yet to jump on the XML feed bandwagon. Thunderbird 1.5 finally makes my page explaining feeds defunct. And, that’s a good thing.
I’ve included some screenshots of a step by step process of subscribing to a feed or a bunch of feeds within Thunderbird. Do look-up, or point others to, if you think this is worth it.
Personally I have preferred using an online RSS reader to keep track of my favorite blogs. Just gives me the flexibility to read the blogs from any internet-connected PC.
Jan 14, 06 at 08:06I should have mentioned that this post wasn’t specifically for existing feed junkies
Jan 14, 06 at 13:46