I decided today that the way I had it setup with reading RSS feeds in Thunderbird sucks. And it did. Having vaguely heard about Liferea from somewhere (a planet blog entry, I think), I installed it and tried it out.

Wow. It rocks, so much more than Thunderbird did. *Entries are quick to load, and if you want to pull up the actual page (what Thunderbird did with every entry), it will do so in the browser of your choice, instead of rendering in the application itself. This rocks, as Firefox stuff like Greasemonkey user scripts and other extensions for page display aren't bypassed (ad removal, etc.).

• Since the preview pane in the application doesn't pull up the actual page and just displays the parsed feed text/info, it's not only fast, but I can read Slashdot without having to deal with its goddawful users/commenters. YES!
• Allows searching of messages.
• Provides a sane, integrated UI and allows setting of update intervals for individual feeds, as well as a global update interval. Feeds are only updated when their interval is due.

That's a lot less time messing with waiting for messages to load in Thunderbird, and a lot less of a cluttered e-mail client. Now it's used for, well, e-mail.

Among other new finds are Logjam, a pretty spiff gtk app for managing Livejournal accounts, and the Clearlooks gtk engine. (Okay, so I really didn't just discover this, but I hadn't taken it for a test spin before). So far I like Clearlooks even more than I did Industrial, though it still has a few quirks to be worked out. I didn't like the less-white window style at first, but now I do. The buttons are especially spiff looking.

I also started automatically backing up the mysql database for here. Well past due, but it really isn't that important, though moreso now than, say, a month or two ago.

Edit: Liferea also has prompted me to re-syndicate Shadows of Isildur's forums again, for quick reading. Muah. Now I can read every post in half the time. And ctrl-r marks an entire feed read. Woot.