RSS Feed problems

So, I’ve got to get this RSS feed problem worked out. Loads of people are reporting problems, and I think its to do with the feed URL, and my brief flirtation with feedburner.

Could everyone who is having problems make sure that the URL is http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/feeds/rss/, and let me know if that fixes it?

Sorry for the inconvenience!

Tags: rss, updates

Jeremy is right! Tiger underwhelms, except for...

How I’ve come to love Safari RSS. No more browser hopping for me?

Tags: osx, rss, safari, software, tiger

Tiger-r-r-r-r

One ‘archive and install’ later, and I’m now running on 10.4. This is just a quick post to offload the Tiger related thoughts in my head to make room for more important matters.

Tags: mac, osx, rss, tiger

Tiger style for NetNewsWire

Just what the world doesn’t need right now – yet another spotlight style for NetNewsWire – but here it is anyway.

Tags: osx, rss, themes, tiger

Skinning sites in Safari with PithHelmet

It would easy to to think that Firefox is the only browser with cool extensions, and overlook the excellent ones available for Safari, such as Saft, Stand and PithHelmet. Here’s how to alter individual sites css using new features in PithHelmet.

Tags: browsers, css, plugins, rss, safari

Alternative Sage Toolbar Icon

My previous modifications to the Firefox Toolbar have one problem. Certain extensions’ toolbar icons become borked. This is due to forcing a css priority, unintentionally overriding css rules for these icons.

The fix is simple, the following rules just need to be re-applied in userChrome.css, after the rules for the main toolbar:

 #sage-button {
  list-style-image: url("chrome://sage/skin/sage.png") !important;
}
toolbar[iconsize="small"] #sage-button {
  list-style-image: url("chrome://sage/skin/sage-small.png") !important;
}

So, while I was at it, I created a new toolbar icon for Sage, based on the new RSS Live Bookmarks icon:

Tags: firefox, rss, sage, themes

Sidebar links with de.licio.us

Update – For various reasons I’ve decided to keep going with my Textpattern version, but the information is here if you need it. Word of warning though – make sure you know what you’re doing with the cache.

I’ve just moved my sidenotes links from the inbuilt textpattern system to de.licio.us, a service I’ve been using more and more over the last couple of months. There was nothing wrong with the Textpattern method, its just that using de.licio.us makes these links a little easier to find again. Now I post my sidenotes using Cocoalicious, a beautfully simple cocoa interface to the de.licio.us api. If the site I want to post is in Safari, I just select ‘New post from Safari’ in Cocoalicious, and it pre-populates the fields. Each tag in de.licio.us can have its own RSS feed, so all that was left was how to integrate the links on my journal pages.

Tags: code, rss, texpattern

Sage on OS X

So far, Sage is the only thing that’s tempting to use Firefox over my Omniweb 5/NewsFire combination. More playing and fiddling ensues…

Tags: firefox, osx, plugins, rss, sage

NetNewsWire 2

The public beta of NetNewsWire 2 is finally available. Go and get yourself a copy, and enjoy new features like (amongst many others) the in-built tabbed browser, with rendering powered by the Safari webcore. Version 2 is also a free upgrade if you’re already a registered user.

With this release, NNW’s welog editor becomes a separate application called MarsEdit. While this doesn’t have the large feature set of Ecto, I prefer the way the interface is laid out and find it much more intuitive. In my last month or so of using Movable Type (before switching to Textpattern), I was using this to write to my journal. One important feature of Ecto’s it does have is the ability to assign your own stylesheet to the preview, to get a better idea of how the article will look. Textpattern is going to include MetaWeblog support soon, so I hope to be back using this when that happens.

Tags: design, hicksdesign, icons, rss

Newsfire 0.1 beta

A new RSS reader is in town, that takes a slightly different approach to the others, positively dripping with OS X beauty…

Tags: osx, reviews, rss, software

RSS sidebar in Safari

Those of you who are registered users of Saft will now have the latest preview version with the new sidebar feature. The plugin nature of the sidebar (each panel can be a web page, perl script or shell script) has got me wondering about what useful little widget I could put in there.

Here’s my first idea. After hacking the excellent Feedonfeeds news aggregator script, I’ve made a little OS X style RSS sidebar. Feedonfeeds is a php/MySQL solution that you can install on your site, rather than using a desktop client. From here I can click the unread number to view the latest feeds, the grey number to see all the recent entries, and the blog name to go straight to the site. The first 2 open in a simplified format – very like the RSS Reader/Sage extension for Firefox, and the upcoming Safari RSS reader.

Tags: code, rss, safari, themes

safari sidebar - beta screenshots (updated)

That’s right. I’ve just received a new Saft beta, with the sidebar that I’ve been bellyaching about for months! To be honest, alhough I pestered Hao for this feature, I never really thought it would be possible, but hey, it never hurts to ask. Hao seems to like a challenge however, and he’s been kind enough to allow me to post screenshots here.

This version works the same as other releases of Saft. The plug-in goes into the Library>InputMangers folder replacing the previous version. Once launched, Safari then has the ‘Show Sidebar’ command in the Safari menu (this is a temporary position).

Tags: plugins, rss, safari, software, themes

NetNewsWire

I’ve become addicted to NetNewsWire for OSX from Ranchero software – a few months ago I’d never heard of ‘RSS News Feeds’, now its become as important as email. Its fast, clearly designed (clean cocoa interface) and it also lets me edit this weblog. There is a Lite version that you can try, but before long you’ll want the full deal. If I’m preaching to the converted, you can subscribe to hicksdesign here.

Tags: osx, rss, software