Bookmarks

The oddest things can set me off --- sometimes into a glum funk, and sometimes delight. I had one of the latter (for a change) last night, while looking into a problem with Live Bookmarks.

LB is a function of Mozilla Firefox. It uses RSS to allow dynamic updating of bookmarks. If the content of the site being bookmarked changes, the bookmark points to the new content. I don't think Internet Explorer supports it, though I don't know that; even if it doesn't, it likely will when the next ponderous version trudges out.

I had only one LB enabled -- the one that comes with the Firefox installation, pointing to a news feed from the BBC. You click on it and get a series of latest headlines from which you can select at will. Several days ago I had noticed that it wasn't working. Selecting the bookmark would yield a box with 'live bookmark loading', and that was it. I futzed around for a while last night, and even reinstalled Firefox (unlike IE, Firefox installs very quickly), but the bookmark didn't work. Then I created a new bookmark pointing to the same BBC site, and it didn't work, either. This time it gave me an explicit error: XML Feed Parse Error. Well, okay, consistancy is good, but what the heck? So I went to the BBC site and read their instructions for using their RSS feed. It said that I needed to click on the RSS logo on their home page, and if I had an RSS-enabled browser (which Firefox is), I would pick up the bookmark. So I did. And got a page from the BBC site with this: XML Feed Parse Error.

It's not me ! It's them! And I figured it out!

This made me feel good.