I think I’ve finally squashed all the issues with the Bloglines Toolkit. If the toolkit appears to be installed when you view it in the extension manager, but you aren’t able to activate the context menu and the logo doesn’t appear in the lower right-hand corner of your browser, try disabling the extension. Just right-click on it in the extension manager to show this option. You’ll need to restart. When that completes, go back and re-enable it. You’ll need to restart again.
If it seems to work, but you can’t see the icon in the status bar, check your installed extensions. There have been at least a couple of reports that there are extension conflicts – specifically with adblock. I have not been able to confirm this myself, but it does seem to happen. In this case, disable all extensions and restart. After the restart, go in and enable only the Bloglines Toolkit and restart again. After the second restart, you should see the icon again and all should be normal. If this is the case, enable all your other extensions again and restart a final time.
The last issue seemed to be with the nightly builds. Because of the new versioning system in the extension architecture, the toolkit wasn’t working. I’ve updated the version information, so it should work with all 0.9 development releases. A new update will be required for version 1.0, as there may be changes to the extension architecture again. Hopefully by then I’ll have figured out the automatic update mechanism. In any case, this issue requires you to download the new version of the extension.
If you run into any problems that do not seem to be solved by these steps, please let me know. Thanks for all the great feedback!
Comments
8 responses to “Bloglines Toolkit 1.3.0”
You need to go to Tools/Options/Web Features and add this site to the list of sites that allow install. Kevin, how about putting this on the mozilla.org extensions site.
Like Kevin, I can’t seem to install. I click on the link but nothing happens.
If you can fix this I’ll drop $$ in the paypal jar.
I get the icon, and clicking opens a new tab, but nothing loads there. This is also the case if I use the contextual menu to go to my subscriptions.
There are actually mutliple problems with that. First and foremost is that the check takes little to no time, at least if you’ve got a reasonable connection to the Internet. You’re talking a couple dozen bytes. Even on dial-up, I doubt you’d notice. The resources necessary to change the icon and then change it back would take far more than the actual check.
It also does change the tip – if you hover over it while it’s checking, you’ll see that it is checking to retrieve the current status.
The final issue is that I’m not a graphics guy. I didn’t design the icons – they came from the fine folks at Bloglines. I simply embedded them into the toolkit. If a Bloglines ‘check’ icon should come into being, I’ll consider it – but just keep in mind that you’d be wasting a lot of processing power just to get a small wiggle. For the amount of time it takes, you’re probably better off without.
It would be nice to see when it’s doing the check. Like, wiggle the B around or something. User feedback is always a good idea.
This version solved the problem with adblock, at least for me. I intalled adblock first and then bloglines, everithing shows OK.
Great work.
Alex
Actually, no logic changed. In fact, only a single byte changed, and that was to handle the maximum version number (changed from 9.0 to 9.0+). The default behavior when you click with unread items is to show your blog subscriptions.
However, once there is no unread indicator (just the B, no red dot), you are instead running the check again. The thinking being that if there are no new items, you don’t need to view your subscriptions. If you have the context menu enabled, you can always right-click in the browser window and select to view your blog subscriptions from there.
So if you click again and there are still unread items, it will show the red dot again, at which point you can click to view your blog subscriptions. This should also all be reflected in tool tips when you hover over the icon (though not as much detail). Let me know if you aren’t getting those, as that would certainly help.
Also let me know if I explained it okay.
I found something which I think may simply be a change in the logic, but I wanted to be sure. Previously, I could left-click on the BT icon to bring up My Blogs in Bloglines, regardless of whether there were any unread items. Now, it seems that left-clicking will only bring up My Blogs if there are unread items. If there are *no* unread items, left-clicking seems to have no effect.