Export RSS feeds from Apple Mail

I’ve been moving my feeds from Apple Mail and Eventbox into a dedicated feed reader, to make it easier to manage and filter them. This was all going well until I tried to get my feeds out of Mail and discovered no OPML import or export ability (apparently, if you are a mac user, you won’t want this basic capability).

Thankfully, with the help of a very simple workout in Terminal (or an apple script) and a quick trip to the internet, this can all be fixed.

Improved Safari 4 rendering trips WordPress

UPDATE (12th April 2009): The WordPress folks seemed to have solved this problem now, despite their earlier refusal to do so. Cheers to them!

Newer, faster JavaScript engines pose a new minefield for web developers. Unlike XHTML or CSS, there is no JavaScript standard to rely upon.

For example, some of WordPress’s buttons and pop-ups seem to have broken in Safari 4.  Basically, it looks like the new JavaScript rendering engine doesn’t like their code.

The pop-up’s don’t seem to work, locking the window behind the pop-up mask, and some of the buttons seem to be non-functional.

I reported the issue and was told they “can’t” support beta browsers, but the issue goes deeper than that. If the code fails now it may also fail when that “beta” browser goes mainstream, and there was no indication that they had any intention of checking it.

UPDATE : WordPress responded to this post via email, so I won’t post their generally balanced but slightly grumpy response…

I’m really sorry I annoyed the folks at WordPress. They do have a great product, and I thought they’d like to know that it wasn’t working properly in Apple’s new browser.

Apparently not. Maybe I should explain myself further…

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see whether WordPress is still broken when Safari 4 gets a proper release, but my point was actually about Standards, and how developers can get tripped by them from time to time.

Automattic have claimed, correctly, that because this is a Beta release they won’t be supporting it. However Safari 4 Beta is the only browser (excluding developer-only nightly builds) to pass the Acid3 test for rendering. Acid3 specifically tests ECMAScript and DOM rendering. The browser’s WordPress currently support get at best 75%, so there will be some changes, and Safari 4 is likely to herald them, just as Firefox 3 forced some sites to change their CSS. There’s a good chance that the issues affecting WordPress will be seen elsewhere too.

Microsoft has been through a similar issue recently, trying to decide how Internet Explorer 8 should render old websites aimed at Explorer 7.

I’m sure the folks at Automattic know all this, other WordPress users have found the problem also. I did seem to annoy them however.

Safari 4 Tabs. Fail.

Safari 4 beta is fast, nifty and… has different tabs. You may like that, but I certainly didn’t. Here’s what’s wrong with Tabs along the top…

1. With multiple tabs open you can’t read the full title of the page. Fail!
2. Double clicking the title area minimises the window, so with Tabs on top, accidentally clicking twice while selecting a tab minimises it completely. Fail!
3. Information about WHAT you are looking at is now truncated (1) as well as being further from the window. This is important, because it requires more work to scan across the bookmark and URL bars than it does to simply meet the top of the browser chrome. Fail!
4. The same goes for targeting a tab with a mouse or pointer. Fail!
5. The close button for the first tab is a hairs-width from the “close everything” button. Don’t hit the wrong one! Fail.

One proposed advantage of having tabs at the top is that it takes up less screen real estate. But then, have you seen how big some mac screens are?? Most Mac users (except for smaller laptops) would run Safari at less than full screen anyway, just so it useable.

This seems like a big usability blunder for Apple, probably so that Safari 4 looked “New” or something. Ironically, the best menu bar feature for Chrome, its two control icons on the right of screen, don’t even appear in the Mac version of Safari 4. Safari on a PC can be run without menu’s on, which is tidy.

I don’t get it, Tabs weren’t broken. Why change them?

Thankfully, Random Genius. has found a fix. Just open a Terminal window, type…

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool NO

And restart Safari. Your normal tabs are restored, and you now get all the benefits of a very fast CSS and JavaScript rendering engine without the frustration.

For more ways to revert bits of Safari 4 you don’t like, visit Random Genius.

Sorting the CSS Mess

You’ve just updated a website design or finished a lengthy series of design iterations, and your CSS file has grown with every move, but chances are you don’t need half the selectors that are in there. This can be especially true if you have adapted a default theme, or are using a templating system that has inheritance, like that used by Drupal.

Using the combination of a good CSS Optimizer, DustMeSelectors, and a little bit of PHP, however, you can fix it in no time at all.

Working with Drupal: Multisites

Multisite installations in Drupal 5 were either simple or dangerously complicated. With Drupal 6, however, its much easier to create simple, inheritance-based multisite setups, using only a couple of modules and some theming know-how.