If you’re a luck Firefox user, then you may have tried Live Bookmarks across the web. If you tried it here, you may have discovered a problem. It may have looked to be a problem with my site, specifically RSSCache.com’s site (the wonderful folks providing my RSS feed,) and thought sven just ain’t with the latest stuff. Well, I’m happy to say that it’s not me and in classic pass-the-buck style, I give all the blame to the Firefox team. Here’s the word from RSSCache:

Ok, we see the problem. Since Live Bookmarks doesn’t store the news on disk, each time you do a refresh of a bookmark this hits on the feed. Since RSScache will send only the latest news added in the feed, when you refresh and no news is returned, Live Bookmarks sets this as an error. If there is however a news added to the feed since the last refresh, this news will appear correctly in Live Bookmarks. So, the message displayed in Live Bookmarks “failed to load” should more be like “no news found”.

This “problem” might be forwarded to the Firefox team, so that they might update the displayed message to let the user know there is not a problem with the feed, but only no news in it.

On our side, this will be hard to fix as Live Bookmarks doesn’t use a different agent name (which would have been a possible fix). We do take note of this and see if we can come up with an alternative solution.

2 Responses to “Firefox Live Bookmarks “Problem” Debugged”

1. Bob Says:
   December 7th, 2004 at 11:14

   Yeah, yeah, yeah…the live bookmarks work fine if I pull rsscache.com out of the url. Ah well, I got it to work and now it functions like all the other sites I follow that have rss feeds.

2. FouZ Says:
   December 9th, 2004 at 9:00

   Well, the problem is simple, Firefox Live Bookmark can’t parse a RSS feed with no tag. When you refresh 5 times a RSS feed with RSSCache.com, the tag are removed to save bandwidth. They (RSSCache.com) probably working on a solution as we speak.