Manage Your Feeds With Firefox
My growing list of RSS feeds is quickly becoming quite difficult to manage. Luckily, I use Firefox. With some simple organizing, I found a pretty simple way to manage and navigate through all my current feeds without ever leaving my browser’s toolbar. With this method of feed reading, you can quickly browse through the days news without even logging into Bloglines.
First open your Firefox browser (note: for this article I will be using version 1.5.0.6) and make sure you have your bookmarks toolbar enabled. (right click on the top toolbar and make sure there is a check mark next to the ‘Bookmarks Toolbar’ item.)
Next, create a new category folder on your bookmarks toolbar. Right click on the toolbar –> new folder — > left-click –> choose a name for this folder depending on the feed category you want to have (i.e. Tech, News, Ted Stephens, etc.). Then click ‘OK’. You can repeat this step to add all the categories that you will need.
Once you have enough categories to get you started, go to the ‘Bookmarks’ tab on the top toolbar and select ‘Manage Bookmarks’. Within this window, you can locate your category subfolders and drag them into a master folder that I called ‘Feeds’ (this should also be created within the bookmarks toolbar).
Now find your feeds. The easiest way I have found to do this is to actually go to the sites that I want to subscribe to, left-click on the little orange feed logo on the right side of the address field, and then select the format of the feed you want. A Firefox popup window should appear asking you where you want to place the feed or ‘Live Bookmark’. When you see this, click the small button on the right of the window and navigate to the appropriate category folder for this feed.
When you’re all set, you can easily browse through all your feed headlines in a snap by navigating through the dropdown menus. While I’m not giving up my Bloglines account just yet, I am enjoying the convenience of having all my news within one easily accessed folder.
thanks to utch for the inspiration
Ehh, what is the news, is this not just an explanation of how bookmarks works ?
Yeah, I’ve been using them this way for a while — really works out nicely. ESPECIALLY with the Bookmarks Synchronizer plugin (although that plugin has one oddity that sometimes requires manual tweaking once in a while; it sometimes loses its auto-update. But I digress)
Here’s what I don’t like about the Live Bookmarks — there’s no way to tell which headlines you’ve already looked at, since they all show up in the folder no matter how old they are or whether you’ve read them or not. I much preferred the Safari handling, which uses color change and (#) to show you which feeds have new content you haven’t seen yet.
Your comparison to Bloglines isn’t valid.
Bloglines is a service you can access from anywhere, wheras Live Bookmarks are restricted to one instance of Firefox (and any Firefox client you import those Live Bookmarks to).
What if you’re like me and work at a place where they only use IE? Bloglines is a good tool to have then.
You’d have done better to compare Live Bookmarks to something like the Sage Firefox extension. By the way, I like Sage better than Live Bookmarks anyway for the same reason as Julia (see above).
Great article. Is there a mod for Firefox Feeds to scroll, so that you can view the entire title of the page without opening it?
use firefox liveClick extension to extend the functionality:
..to quickly access a Live Bookmark’s home page without having to create an additional bookmark..
Ha ve a look at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2499/
Why don’t we try Mintr (http://mintr.com). Apart from a feed reader like Bloglines it is a great way to share your news.
I find the Wizz newsreader add-on for FF excellent. Opens a sidebar, all the feeds in front of you, colour-coding for read items & customisable. Recommended.
Hey LZ -
Nice tip with the Folders in the Live Bookmarks. Ive been searching for a way to add more Live Bookmarks to my toolbar without having them trailing off the screen. Who would have known that the solution was right in front of me
-Nick
I was just wondering if you are using this for this blog.
Good site I found…Plan on coming back later.
Google for Google Reader. Use it. Love it.