Paul Hutchinson's Blog

An old post from 2010 outlined a method that I used successfully to create update feeds for some of my static websites. It’s been a long time since I needed to add an entry to the feeds and when I went to do it yesterday I discovered it doesn’t work any more. This is because Google changed Reader removing the Note in Reader function that the old method relied upon.

After searching around the net I came to the conclusion that I’d have to just manually create the XML files for the RSS feeds. I spent some time getting it to work but the biggest hurdle is re-working the HTML snippets for the feed. You have to change all the XML reserved characters to escaped versions, which I got wrong many times.

It became very apparent that hand editing the XML was not going to be a viable way to create the feed because of the amount of time it would take to get each update correct. So I searched more and found a solution that I wish I’d found before I started in 2010.

The truly simple and painless way to create RSS feeds for static web sites is an application from Dan Bricklin. He released the program nearly a decade ago but for some reason almost no one mentions it in response to questions about this topic. The program, ListGarden is released under the GPL and available as a generic Perl application, a Windows binary and a Mac OS-X Perl application.

The documentation is excellent making it very easy to get up and running. Once the XML is created and placed on the web site, simply point FeedBurner to the XML and you’re done. Well there’s actually a bit more required for best effect but there are a ton of resources on the net that cover the topic including the FeedBurner Help pages.

I do have one tip for using ListGarden, if you use the Reorder function make sure to modify the PubDates so that the list remains in chronological order. I didn’t do this and it made FeedBurner act very strange.

In case you’re interested, the best page I found for manually creating the XML file is: How to Create an RSS Feed With Notepad, a Web Server, and a Beer ~ Stephen’s Web.

The Malware Survival blog has discovered that we-care.com is serving up bucket loads of malware to its users.

I’ve been using and promoting Firefox since the beginning when it was named Phoenix back in 2002. The browser has improved steadily in 8-1/2 years getting better with every release. The availability of version 4.0 this week brings major improvements in speed and usability, so naturally I had to upgrade. Since I didn’t participate in the beta testing and I also didn’t read up enough on this version, my version 4 experience was not what I’d anticipated.

This brings up my first tip, update your video driver or check the MozillaWiki to make sure your driver version is OK. I had very old Nvidia drivers so Firefox had to turn off the some of its new features. This made Firefox 4 not seem much faster than version 3.6 for page rendering. Once I updated my video drivers the performance improvements where definitely noticeable.

With my video driver updated I gave Firefox 4 a good workout on dozens of web sites I frequent and I’m very impressed with the rendering and JavaScript speed improvement over version 3.6. However as I played around with new features I hit a major crash problem that nearly made me roll back to 3.6. After logging out of Google Reader, and when opening some other pages, the loading icon showed that the page would never finish loading. When I closed the loading tab and then went to close Firefox the confirm close dialog said that Firefox thought I had more tabs open than where visible.

A few times Firefox even got stuck so badly I had to terminate it from task manager. Searching the support site and checking everywhere with Google I couldn’t find anyone else having this problem.

Following normal troubleshooting procedures I first disabled all my extensions and plug-ins to see if any of them was causing the problem, nope the problem persisted. I began to suspect there was something defective in the profile I was using. I’d been keeping this profile through all the upgrades since 2006 so it seemed quite possible it was corrupt in some obscure way. So I fired up my newest and cleanest profile, success, it did not have the problem. With my suspicion confirmed, I backed up my old profile, deleted it in profile manager then made a new profile with the old name. I repeated this for all my older profiles and they all now work flawlessly with Firefox 4. So my second tip is, if you have any problems after upgrading an ancient profile, nuke it and start fresh.

My next tip only applies if you are running Windows XP, turn on the new Firefox Button (it’s on by default in Vista/Win7). It replaces the standard menu freeing up a lot of screen space, see this article for details. Finally you may be wondering what happened to the Status bar, it’s now called the Add-on bar and Firefox 4 is really designed to run with it turned off freeing up more screen real estate.

The old status bar function of showing the target of links is now provided by a small pop-up at the bottom of the screen, very nice. Most plug-ins that put there control icons in the status bar can now have their icons in the navigation toolbar, so most people no longer need to have the add-on bar visible. There are a couple of exceptions, the Xmarks and Zotero plug-ins that for now need to use the add-on bar. To eliminate all the blank space in the add-on bar I’m using the Barlesque plug-in, it shrinks the bar to the minimum size needed and allows you to quickly hide the rest when you want to free up even more screen space.

Now that I’ve used Firefox 4 for a few days I’m comfortable saying this is the best Firefox ever! I recommend everyone upgrade today.