Firefox dead bookmarks

Wednesday 15 September 2004 — This is 20 years old. Be careful.

Mozilla Firefox has released its Preview Release. This includes a new feature called Live Bookmarks, which are bookmarked RSS feeds. They appear as folders full of bookmarks to the items in the feed. A cool idea, but it doesn’t work for this site.

Firefox displays the orange RSS icon in the status bar on this page, and correctly finds my two RSS feeds. But using the bookmarks just displays “Live Bookmark feed failed to load.” As far as I know, other RSS readers have no problems with my feeds, but there could be problems I don’t hear about. I’ll have to dig into it, I guess.

Update: Feed Validator says my feed is invalid. I fixed a few things, but it still wants me to add more redundant information to make the feed 100% valid. Can I just say that I hate RDF, I hate RSS, and Atom seems overly complicated as well? None of them are simple. Blah.

Comments

[gravatar]
Brandon Corfman 11:30 AM on 15 Sep 2004
I'm using the new RSS reader of Mozilla Thunderbird 0.8, and I can't subscribe to your feed there either. They apparently share the same XML parsing code.
[gravatar]
Mike Watkins 1:29 PM on 15 Sep 2004
And can we add xthml and html strict to the list of dislikes?

I do like Firefox in general, Evolution for mail though, but believe I will stick to Rawdog for aggregation.

http://offog.org/code/rawdog.html

An example (my personal list):
http://www.mikewatkins.net/rawdog.html

Rawdog uses Mark Pilgrim's ultra-liberal feed parser, because few in the world are perfect.
[gravatar]
Matt White 8:01 AM on 16 Sep 2004
Ned,

Your site seems to work fine for me using Firefox 1.0 which I downloaded yesterday.

Matt
[gravatar]
Bob 12:53 PM on 16 Sep 2004
Ned,

If it's any consolation, Jason Kottke mentioned that Firefox had problems with his RSS feed too. Guess the Mozilla folks aren't using a very forgiving RSS parser.
[gravatar]
Destiny 5:19 PM on 13 Nov 2004
I was having the same problem -- getting a "Live Bookmark Failed to Load" message.

Apparently every item in your feed MUST HAVE a link and a title. (HTML code will confuse it, too...and don't say Content-type: text/html in your feed's header.)

I think Live Bookmarking could set the standard overnight for all feed-readers. But the browser and the feeds need to be communicating !!!

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