Livejournal? Firefox? A public service announcement.

[Dr Unne]

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:



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.



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.



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.

[Yamaneko]

I read an article somewhere about the kid who created RSS (he was fifteen at the time). It seems to be a popular medium for spreading blogs throughout the Internet. I've yet to utilize RSS in a productive manner, but I'll check it out.

This is another reason why Firefox beats IE.

[DMKA]

Firefox still sucks.

*downloads new Firefox*

EDIT: Holy crap, not only does it STILL suck, but its even worse in the fact that pages load even slower now.

[Psychotic]

But couldn't you just use your Friends page instead?

[Dr Unne]

Not if you don't have an LJ. And RSS feeds are tiny. 6KB or so, compared to loading a whole web page just to see that nothing good has been updated. RSS feeds are for when you want to constantly and quickly check if something has been updated.

[Peegee]

You have successfully increased my LJ productivity several hundred percent. I don't know whether to thank you or post :aimmad: over and over. ^_^

[Zell's Fists of Fury]

I agree. It IS pudding time, children.

[Shlup]

I, uhm... thank you, Unne.

[Leeza]

RSS is a nice little feature.

I can't find any themes for 1.0PR though.

[Shoyku]

Does Unne work for Mozilla? Or is he actually a robot made by Mozilla that's being used to stomp out Microsoft? HOORJ only knows.

Anyways, fancy feature. I'll probably be usin' it.

[Dr Unne]

RSS is a nice little feature.

I can't find any themes for 1.0PR though.

http://mozthemes.tk/
http://update.mozilla.org/
http://home.comcast.net/%7Elynchknot/fthemes.html (But he's closing his site and only the top one works. But it's a really nice one. )
http://browse.deviantart.com/skins/w...der=5&limit=24

[Leeza]

Deviant Art has some nice themes. Actually my problem wasn't that I couldn't find any themes, it was that I couldn't find any that would seem to work, but I finally figured out that I have to close/open Firefox before they change. I just thought that they weren't working for some reason. With Firefox .9 the theme was changed as soon as you clicked <i>Use Theme</i> so I assumed that 1.0PR was the same, but it's not. It's a bit more or a pain to have to close/open to see the full effect of the new theme, but I can live with it.

*changes theme back to Red Cats (green flavor)*

[Rainecloud]

Firefox still sucks.

[crono_logical]

Firefox needs to fix that memory bug when restoring from minimised in Windows that makes it take forever to respond *uses it anyway since too lazy to replace it with Mozilla on the laptop*

[Baloki]

Firefox needs to fix that memory bug when restoring from minimised in Windows that makes it take forever to respond *uses it anyway since too lazy to replace it with Mozilla on the laptop*

Well fix it then, it is open source!