2004-12-18 Software

I’m trying to install rss2email at home, now. Why? Long story. I used Sage for quite a while. But I didn’t really like it very much. It *is* better than live bookmarks (those I don’t like at all), but not as cool as reading mail. Today I found that Firefox didn’t show Flash anymore. I was browsing the Embrace Decay page on codetransform.com (I *think* this was a ViridianDesign contest), and noticed that Flash failed me. Typing ’about:plugins’ in my address bar, showed me no flash plugin. Weird. Went to my backups directory, ran the installer again, found instructions on the web saying I just needed to copy the two files, verified that the installer had worked, still no go. Reading the flash plugin FAQ I realized that a long time ago I had installed the Flash Click To View extension. Argh! Ok, so I moved my ~_.mozilla_firefox directory, ran firefox again, then copied some files from the old directory over (bookmarks, cookies, form history, etc.) – and instead of reinstalling all the extensions including Sage, I decided to give rss2email another try.

rss2email

Embrace Decay

ViridianDesign

flash plugin FAQ

The interface seems simple enough. Unfortunately ’r2e list’ doens’t show feed titles. I think this will be hard to manage when I subscribed to 50 feeds or more... Well, I ain’t there yet. I also noticed how a a pickle is used to store data... I really like simple human-readable text files better. How hard can it be? Oh well. Anyway, added about 20 feeds, and did a ’r2e run’ – seemed to work. Until I realized that my *sendmail* doesn’t send mail to the outside world. It just delivers local mail. And since I said my email address was alex@emacswiki.org, all those mails are now stuck in the sendmail queue somewhere and will end up as error reports for my root mail account. Yuck! I then manually edited the pickle file and replaced alex@emacswiki.org with just ’alex’. Dunno whether that was enough. Subsequent runs of r2e did not generate mail. So I’m not sure what it all means, except that rss2email was not trivial to get running because of cursed sendmail config problems. Every lousy email-sending collection of bytes needs to know how to use SMTP directly, because a mere mortal like myself cannot configure sendmail. Oh well.

As a test, I signed up to a new blog, and run r2e again. Worked! 😄

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