Dr Unne
09-27-2004, 01:22 AM
The latest version of Firefox, <a href="http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/">1.0PR</a>, has a nice RSS syndication feature. Some people may not be aware, so I'm going to <s>spread some Firefox propaganda</s> let you know about it. Livejournal and many other websites use RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's more or less a compressed XML version of a website which you can use to get an overview, and do various things with it like display it in a news-ticker or as a list of links or list of summaries, or whatever the site designer wants. But let's demonstrate with Livejournal, since that's fairly popular.
First go to an LJ of your choice. Let's use RSL. In the very bottom right of the Firefox window, there will appear a little icon saying "RSS". Like so:
http://chwombat.net/random/rss/rss1.png
Click on that, and it'll give you a menu of all the RSS feeds which Firefox has found for the current site. Let's choose the first one, shall we? And in the tooltip it shows you the URL of the RSS feed, but you don't need to know that.
http://chwombat.net/random/rss/rss2.png
Up pops a window. Give the RSS-bookmark a name just like you would a normal bookmark, and select a place to store it. I made a new folder called LiveJournals, and I'll put all the RSS feeds for the LJs which interest me into that folder.
http://chwombat.net/random/rss/rss3.png
So click add and you're done. Now, when you look in the LiveJournals folder, rather than plain old bookmarks, each RSS bookmark you created will be a subfolder, and in that subfolder will be links to all the entries that person has posted in their LJ.
<a href="http://chwombat.net/random/rss/rss4.png" alt="rss4" />Picture too big to post here.</a>
What's more, these things are updated DYNAMICALLY. You can right-click on them and choose "Refresh Live Bookmark", and it will download the feed and update itself to show the most recent entries.
This is my good deed for the year. Have fun.
First go to an LJ of your choice. Let's use RSL. In the very bottom right of the Firefox window, there will appear a little icon saying "RSS". Like so:
http://chwombat.net/random/rss/rss1.png
Click on that, and it'll give you a menu of all the RSS feeds which Firefox has found for the current site. Let's choose the first one, shall we? And in the tooltip it shows you the URL of the RSS feed, but you don't need to know that.
http://chwombat.net/random/rss/rss2.png
Up pops a window. Give the RSS-bookmark a name just like you would a normal bookmark, and select a place to store it. I made a new folder called LiveJournals, and I'll put all the RSS feeds for the LJs which interest me into that folder.
http://chwombat.net/random/rss/rss3.png
So click add and you're done. Now, when you look in the LiveJournals folder, rather than plain old bookmarks, each RSS bookmark you created will be a subfolder, and in that subfolder will be links to all the entries that person has posted in their LJ.
<a href="http://chwombat.net/random/rss/rss4.png" alt="rss4" />Picture too big to post here.</a>
What's more, these things are updated DYNAMICALLY. You can right-click on them and choose "Refresh Live Bookmark", and it will download the feed and update itself to show the most recent entries.
This is my good deed for the year. Have fun.