Month: June 2008

Thunderbird Ate My RSS

~ James Viscosi ~ 5 Comments

Once I got beyond reading five or six blogs, it became more or less impossible to keep up with checking them online and seeing if there were new posts; so I started subscribing to their RSS feeds using the Thunderbird mail client.  This worked fine and made it much easier to avoid missing posts.  However, today I became aware that a couple of my subscriptions had stopped functioning (sorry, Finicky Penguin and Cinema Gypsy).  The folders were still there, but they looked empty, so I thought, okay, I’ll just add the subscriptions back in.  Wrong!  Thunderbird wouldn’t let me add them because it said I was already subscribed.  I went through every single feed folder looking for the phantom feeds, but they were nowhere to be found.

Hmm.  What to do next?  I decided to try exporting all my feeds and then importing them again.  So I created the export file (under Subscribe –> Export), deleted all my feed folders, and then imported the feed file (under Subscribe –> Import).  Everything came back, except for the two missing feeds.  So I thought, okay, I deleted everything, so I should be able to add the missing feeds back in now.  Wrong!  Thunderbird still insisted I was subscribed to them, even though it hadn’t pulled in any messages from them in over two weeks and they were nowhere to be found in any of the other folders.

Mutter mutter mutter.  Okay, now what?  After briefly flirting with going back to Opera and its wonderful M2 mail & RSS client, I opened the feed export that I created earlier (it’s an OPML file, which can be edited with any text editor), deleted everything out of it except for two entries, and then proceeded to modify them to be for the two missing feeds.  Then I imported the hacked OPML file.  Eureka!  There are my missing feeds!  I dragged them back to the “Blogs” folder under RSS feeds, and here come all the posts that I missed from those two blogs.

Oh no! Information overload! I’ll pick up commenting on the new posts as they arrive …

For those who are interested, here’s the OPML file after I edited it:

<opml version=”1.0″>
<head>
<title>Thunderbird OPML Export</title>
<dateCreated>Sat, 28 Jun 2008 15:38:33 GMT</dateCreated>
</head>
<body>
<outline text=”Blogs”>
<outline title=”The Show Must Go On” text=”The Show Must Go On” type=”rss” version=”RSS” xmlUrl=”http://cinemagypsy.wordpress.com/feed/&#8221; htmlUrl=”http://cinemagypsy.wordpress.com/”/&gt;
<outline title=”Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Soda” text=”Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Soda” type=”rss” version=”RSS” xmlUrl=”http://finickypenguin.wordpress.com/feed/&#8221; htmlUrl=”http://finickypenguin.wordpress.com/feed/”/&gt;
</outline>
</body>
</opml>

Recall

~ James Viscosi ~ Leave a comment

A while back, I sent a copy of Dragon Stones to the artist in Italy.  With his sharp artist’s eye, he noticed that the cover illustration of the dragon was not anti-aliased properly.  This problem has now been fixed, and the cover art looks much better — the lines are smooth rather than pixellated and the details are sharper.

I’m of the mind that anyone who bought Dragon Stones with the pixellated cover art is deserving of a pristine copy that looks the way the artist intended.  If you have a copy of the book and would like to get the updated version, please let me know and I will send you one free of charge.  (Obviously you shouldn’t post your address information in a public comment, so feel free to e-mail me at the listed address.)

Now, some might say that this could be an expensive thing for me to do.  But don’t worry.  I know how many copies of Dragon Stones have been sold, and it won’t be.  (Too bad …)

Dragon Stones: A Lulu Of A Review

~ James Viscosi ~ 4 Comments

So I found out today that someone wrote a capsule review of Dragon Stones on Lulu.com.  (My father, who keeps closer track of this sort of thing than I do, let me know about it.)  With some trepidation I went to read the review, but I needn’t have worried — this is the best review I’ve gotten since M. Kenyon Charboneaux rated Night Watchman “1,000 on a scale of 1-5”.  Although the review is anonymous, let me assure everyone that I didn’t write it myself; I was busy in the mountains all day today!

Dragon Stones
6 out of 6
1 Jun 2008

by
The story captures the reader right away with interesting characters and descriptive writing. The writer is, in fact, facile with words and the book is an easy read. While it follows the adventure genre of characters moving from situation to situation, one does not wonder, as with some novels, when the string of obstacles will end. I might add that the cast of characters is diverse and interesting. Although it is a lengthy novel, it was not overlong and kept my interest. While the ending ties everything up decently, there are enough strings left for a couple of sequels, and I, for one hope they follow soon.
To the anonymous reviewer:  I don’t have any sequels in the works right now, but I’ve got plans … 😉