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RSS.  You probably know what it is.  Or maybe you don’t.  Maybe you think you know, but don’t use it for whatever reason, like laziness or you don’t see the point of it.  If any of these is you, it’s gonna be ok, keep reading.

What it is: RSS is a stream of the articles from a site. It includes the article titles and an excerpt (or sometimes the entire post) and also sometimes an image or an attached mp3.  In your RSS reader, or a Firefox RSS plugin, you subscribe to these “feeds” of all of your favorite sites.  Then you can get a preview of them before you click them.

You may be asking:  “ok great but why is this any better than just visiting the sites directly?” I’ll tell ya why.

1) You visit a lot of sites.   2) Some of the sites don’t post new stuff all the time.   3) You still want to be aware of these posts without visiting that site all the time only to find no new content.

RSS is for you.  “Isn’t clicking each one the same as just visiting the site?” No, because of watch lists.  They basically alert you whenever one of your favorite sites gets a new post.  More on them in a bit.

If you’re in a work environment, browsing via RSS will probably result in many fewer bytes transferred, if you’re concerned about that sort of thing.  Or if you’re still on a (lol) dialup, RSS would be essential.

“I’m ready to check it out, what are my options?” Well you can get a dedicated RSS application, or you can use Firefox’s innate RSS capability Live Bookmarks, or use what I believe to be the best option: the Firefox Wizz RSS add-on.  If you’re with me, go get it and come back.  Here’s a screenshot.

Exhibit A.  Notice the toolbar and sidebar

Ok hopefully you’ve installed it and restarted Firefox. ¿Listos? Vamos a empezar.

You should see a new Wizz toolbar. From the Options etc. dropdown select ‘Set as default feed handler’ and restart Firefox again.

To toggle the Wizz sidebar, you can press Alt-Q. This is configurable in the options.

Now, if a web page you’re on has an RSS feed available, Firefox notes it by showing this icon (#1):

Exhibit B

To add the site’s feed to the Wizz, click that RSS icon (and choose one of the subscribe options if necessary).  Then on the page that appears select Wizz as the default RSS reader, then ‘Always use’, and you will be shown some instructions and an icon which you can drag to your Wizz sidebar.  From now on when you click RSS icons you will be taken directly to this page.  (To change your RSS reader in the future, go into Firefox options, Applications tab, it’s the Web Feed association).

You can also add feeds by clicking the ‘Feed Search’ button in the Wizz toolbar.  This pops up:

Exhibit C

Just drag the desired feed (the 2.0 one) into the Wizz sidebar and close the popup.

Click your new feed in the sidebar.  Notice the pane of articles.  You can merely hover over these to see a preview below.  Or you can click it to load it in your current browser tab.  These panes are resizable obviously.

Here’s the real juice of RSS though. The watch list is what makes it so sweet, and will make you wish you’d been using it sooner.  Go into the Options in the Wizz toolbar.  Go to the Watch List tab and select ‘Automatically start Watch List’ and ‘Alert when new items are found’.  Notice also the options for Watch Interval, and playing a sound file.  Exit the options.

Now, for sites which you really want to be up to date on, right-click the feed in the Wizz sidebar and ‘Add to Watch List’.  It will now show a little left arrow to its right.  Every X minutes the Wizz will now poll the feeds on your Watch List for updates, and if there are any, show you this popup:

Exhibit D

Feeds on your Watch List which have new posts will now be highlighted in the sidebar list.  Sweet.

Some general tips:
1) Sometimes you will not see an RSS icon in the URL bar, but you will see an RSS link or icon somewhere on a page. Click it, and [if necessary select Wizz as the default RSS reader, then 'Always use', then from now on when you click an RSS icon] you should be shown some instructions and an icon which you can drag to your Wizz sidebar. Failing THAT, you can also add a feed to Wizz manually by right-clicking whitespace below your feeds in the sidebar, select Add Feed, and paste in the (typically .xml) URL of a feed.
2) If you’d prefer to manually kick off the watch list updates, uncheck ‘Automatically start Watch List’ in the options and select ‘Run Once’ from the Watch List dropdown in the toolbar.
3) You may not want to add very frequently updating [news] sites to your watch list, it would kind of defeat the purpose, you would get a popup every time.
4) You can right-click a feed and Mark as Read.  This can be good to do, even if you haven’t actually read them, so that next time the new posts will stand out with their green icon.
5) Single click a feed to refresh it.
6) Double-click a feed to load the site in the current browser tab.
7) Drag feeds to reorder them.
8 ) Right-click a post in the sidebar and you can choose ‘Open unread in New Tabs’.
9) You can create folders for your feeds, they’re called Categories. Right-click whitespace below your feeds and pick Add Category.
10) I find Wizz RSS a great way to “multitask browse”, say if I’m half-watching a YouTube vid.
11) You can RSS-subscribe to people’s YouTube channels to be notified of their new videos.
12) You can RSS-subscribe to new episodes of shows on Hulu. Go to the main page for the show, click the RSS icon for episodes.  Or you could just create a Hulu account and subscribe to shows that way and even get email alerts when new episodes show up.
13) To remove a site from Watch List go into Manage Watch List from the toolbar. Or right-click the feed in the sidebar list, go into Properties, and uncheck Watch this feed.
14) Sometimes if a post in the sidebar is in italics you will see a popup when you click it and you’re not sure what to do. Choose Item Link usually. Enclosure Link or Save Enclosure can be useful if you want to jump to or save a link, such as an mp3.
15) As a Watch action you can also choose Save, this is for offline reading I guess, say with a laptop. Toggle this from a feed’s properties or from Manage Watch List.
16) You can also save your feed list to their server, I presume for backup purposes or for syncing to other machines.  Find this under the Options dropdown. You’ll need to create an Account first.

To toggle the Wizz toolbar, you can do this:  1) Right-click its whitespace (or if it’s gone, right-click the tiny area #2 in Exhibit B above).  You can toggle the toolbar here (or also from the View->Toolbars menu), but I like to do one better.  From that toolbar popup, go to Customize.  This pops up:

Exhibit E

Scroll to the bottom and drag the Wizz Toggle Toolbar button up to the left of your URL bar, or wherever.  See #3 in Exhibit B above.   (The other Wizz icon in there toggles the sidebar, but I just use Alt-Q.) Close the popup.  That button will now toggle the Wizz toolbar for you.  I just find it handy to tuck it away thusly because it’s mostly not needed.

That’s it!  You’re well on your way to kicking ass.

Enjoy this post? Questions? Got more tips or a better system? Put a comment below plz.

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posted: 09 March 9
under: firefox, internet, productivity, tips