keep thunderbird alive!

platform fatigue

With the myriad of platforms used to counteract the absence of most direct interactions at work, I start to suffer from platform fatigue, constantly switching to a different interface and wasting a lot of time on retrieving links from old emails and reentering passwords… Even a single platform like Teams requires permanent juggling between Dauphine and Warwick (obviously linked with Microsoft constraints), plus repeated updates that clash more often than enough with Firefox. Not to mention collaborative systems like Overleaf, Wikimath, Git, and others. Same thing for regular Zoom meetings which fail to reopen from one week to the next. And calendars that cannot keep track of everything or even anything! The only interface that keeps working (for me) across accounts is my Thunderbird email interface, except for the sharp increase in the email volume (and the fact that many now bypass emails for chats on Teams, Slack, and another myriad of platforms).

Thunderbird avenging the pigeons?

It may be the revenge of the birds, but there seems to be an issue with the latest version of Thunderbird in terms of RSS feed: here is an email from Umberto I got very recently

(…) I have just discovered I missed the latest RSS feeds (the last one downloaded on my Thunderbird for Windows is https://xianblog.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/inherent-difficulties-of-non-bayesian-likelihood-based-inference/) i.e. those published after 8th November.

This happened simultaneously on my 2 computers and only for the POSTS feed of your blog. RSS feeds from other blogs give no problem. Also I have no problem with the Comments feed. This is might be related to the latest Thunderbird version (v. 8.0) which has been been released on 8th November = date of the latest downloaded feed (!).

I have deleted the feed to your posts and tried to install them again but now I get a “https://xianblog.wordpress.com/feed is not a valid feed”. Reinstalling Thunderbird didn’t solve the issue nor even going back to the latest working Thunderbird installation. So I am writing you to let you know about this issue, not to solve my own specific problem but just in case the issue is not due to Thunderbird but to some settings you might have recently modified in your blog.

I have no idea about the problem nor the solution. There was something similar discussed on wordpress five years ago, but unlikely to apply. I will certainly contact wordpress and let interested readers know if they come up with a solution (or at least a reason).