Geodog

Using FeedDemon with Mozilla and Firebird

I beta tested FeedDemon this summer and liked it well enough, but decided not to switch from using Firebird's brilliant RSS Reader panel because FeedDemon depended on IE, and because Nick Bradbury decided not to make the feature requests I wanted in order to make FeedDemon easier to use on a laptop with a pointing device. FeedDemon is very pretty, but it would be a lot better if a 2-pane interface like Eudora's was an option.

I still love RSS Reader panel, and will continue to use it for my daily reads, but it is awkward to have more than 15 or so RSS feeds in the side panel, and my list of sites that I like to drop in on is longer than that, so I've been looking around. Today I ran across a post by Erik Arvidsson on how to patch FeedDemon to work with Mozilla and Firebird. To quote Erik:

1. Download Mozilla ActiveX Control 1.5 and install it. I guess one could use the one packaged with Mozilla Firebird but this one did not work out of the box.
2. Download a small program called IEPatcher. I found this from a different site that has some good information.
3. Run the IEPatcher.exe and select the FeedDemon directory and patch the FeedDemon.exe file
4. This creates a file called moz_FeedDemon.exe. Run this and update all your shortcuts to point to this exe file instead.

Brilliant. (Although it should be noted that I have not been able to try this myself yet.).

Now that Nick Bradbury has announced that he is ready to ship FeedDemon, I'll have to give it another try, this time with Mozilla and Firebird.

And it seems worth trying to patch the two other IE dependent programs I used to use on a daily basis, Mybase, and Surfsaver.