Old Ex Cathedra

How? Start with the article at the unofficial how-to blog for Thunderbird.

Only one problem: that puts every blog in the same stewpot. What happened to organizing your blog feeds? Well, it can be done, but it’s a little harder.

Here’s how to do it. Start off by setting up the options to get News and Blogs on Thunderbird, just like in the how-to blog article.

Now let’s get organized. Create some subfolders under News & Blogs. I’ve got one folder for friends’ blogs and another for miscellaneous fun stuff. I have another for music, one for science, and one for news. Do what you like for yours. I’m just assuming in the example that follows that you have a subfolder under News & Blogs called “Fun.”

Let’s imagine you want to get RSS feeds from MSNBC’s Peculiar Postings. Make a “Peculiar Postings” sub-subfolder under “Fun” like this:

Now go to one of the articles under “Peculiar Postings” on MSNBC:

Click the RSS icon at the right of the address bar. It’s the one that looks like a wedge made up of 3 curved lines:

I think it’s supposed to represent a broadcast. What that has to do with RSS, I don’t know, but there you are. It turns out in this case, you’ll be offered two choices: subscribe to Peculiar Postings or subscribe to top news stories. Pick the former, and you’ll see a page that asks you what program you want to use to subscribe:

Oh, cool. It offers you the choice of using Thunderbird. Nope. They’re deceiving you. That would be way too convenient. What you should do instead is highlight the URL of the page you’re on now (the one that’s asking you what program to use) and copy it to the clipboard (ctrl-c).

Now go to Thunderbird and open up the main page under News & Blogs:

Click on “Manage subscriptions.”

Paste the URL you just copied to the clipboard in the “Feed URL” space (ctrl-v).

Wait! You’re not done! Click on “Store Articles In” and open up the tree:

Navigate to the folder for “Peculiar Postings” under “Fun”. And now you can click “OK”.

Hardly the epitome of convenience, but it does work, and it lets you use Thunderbird’s built-in blog reader, which does work reasonably well, and it lets you organize your feeds. Remember, always create the subfolder your feed will be going to before you click “Manage Subscriptions”.

And note too that putting several feeds into one subfolder (e.g., putting Dilbert, Kevin and Kell, User Friendly, and Xkcd into “Toons”) is a lot easier than making a separate subfolder for each one.

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Now playing: Kenny Dorham – Mamacita

This entry was posted by Rev. Bob on Monday, August 27th, 2007 at 4:10 am and is filed under Power Surfing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.