Every once in a while, I get an email or a comment about problems with the Bloglines Toolkit. Luckily, this really happens only every once in a while. I say luckily because my experience with JavaScript programming is pretty pathetic, and I’m really amazed that I don’t get lots more requests for help.
Most of the problems I’ve seen thus far are resolved by a simple disabling and re-enabling of the Toolkit. The most common “fix” I’ve used is to have the user disable the Toolkit. You’ll need to restart your browser at this point, and when you do the Toolkit extension will be disabled. Then you can re-enable it. Naturally, this requires another restart. But after that second restart, quite often the problem has been fixed.
If this doesn’t fix the problem, then disabling all of your extensions, and then re-enabling them one at a time, will typically resolve the problem. I’m really not certain about what this does, but it seems to reset whatever is having problems so that things work correctly again.
If you’re having problems installing, there are a few potential issues. The first has to do with versions, and those mostly with Firefox version numbers. The earliest version of the Toolkit (0.9.0) ought to work with versions of Firefox up to 0.8. You’ll need version 1.2.0 or better of the Toolkit to work with 0.9. For those of you who like nightly builds, you’ll need version 1.3.0 of the Toolkit to work with nightly builds after 0.9. For anything higher than version 0.10 of Firefox, all the way up to and including development (nightly) builds after 1.0, the current version (1.4.1) will take care of your needs. The different versions should be backwards compatible – so 1.4.1 should work with Firefox all the way back to 0.8.
If you’re having problems getting the Toolkit installation to even run from the web site (one of those links above), you should save the file to your local disk, and open it from there. This should begin the process. If it doesn’t, check your preferences. There’s one named “Allow web sites to install software”, and at this writing is found under:
Tools->Options->Advanced->Software Update
Even if you save the file to disk and try to open it from there, this needs to be enabled. Finally, you could try and execute the installation manually, by using this URL in the address bar:
javascript:InstallTrigger.startSoftwareUpdate("url")
If you use this final method, replace “url” with the path to the file you want to install.
Comments
3 responses to “Troubleshooting the Toolkit”
I tried that extension. I’m not sure there’s anything in the actual implentation that would be good for the Bloglines toolkit.
But the general idea would be cool: adding the equivalent menu item as “Subscribe to this Page” to the RSS menu. It would subscribing easier, as you’d use the visual indicator that a feed was available, plus you wouldn’t have to go through a submenu on the context menu.
Actually, I received a message about it this morning, so I have looked briefly at it. It looks to me like Feed Your Reader simply provides a way to launch the current feed in your reader. Mark (at Bloglines) and I have talked briefly about this, but it’s going to involve a bit of design work – namely how to make it work with the toolkit. But it’s definitely on the radar. Thanks for the note.
Chad, have you seen Feed Your Reader, yet? Seems like a perfect idea to combine with Bloglines Toolkit.
http://projects.koziarski.net/fyr/
http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2004/09/feed_your_reade.html