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Complete Guide to RSS (or: Nobody Beats the Wizz)

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

Tips for the Firefox search box

firefoxsearch

The search box in the upper right of Firefox should be a staple for you. Here are some things you may not have known.

Ctrl-K gives it focus.
If you want to remove or re-order the searches, go to ‘Manage Search Engines’ under the dropdown.
You can also ‘Get more search engines..’ from that same Manage Search Engines screen. It takes you to an add-on subpage; just key in the site you’d like to find a search for, e.g. IMDB.
Sometimes while web browsing you may notice that the dropdown in the search box will glow blue (color may depend on your theme). This indicates that you can add a search for that site very quickly to your search bar. Look for the option under the dropdown. There aren’t many sites which feature this ability, but CNN is one example.
You can assign a keyword to a search on the Manage Search Engines page. They work like this: you pick a few letters for a keyword, e.g. asd for IMDB, then you can type the keyword followed by your search terms in your address bar to quickly perform that search, e.g. ‘asd tom cruise’. Note that you can also do this directly from basically any search box you find on the net, by right-clicking in it and selecting ‘Add keyword for this search’. Ctrl-L gives address bar focus.
You can update the Google icon to their new favicon by following the directions here.

How to mute Firefox (or any app) with Vista

mutefirefox2

Trick I’ve discovered in Vista for muting just Firefox, say if you’re playing a flash game with no mute button on it and you want to hear your iTunes..

1: Click speaker icon

2: Click Mixer

3: Put your junk in that box

Not only is selectively muting apps highly useful, but this is also the place where you can permanently change the relative volume of anything which doesn’t have a volume knob.

Addendum 11/12/09: Now Ubuntu 9.10 has come on board with this capability. Right click the sound icon and enter Sound Preferences (or via System->Preferences->Volume Control). It’s on the Applications tab:

Screenshot-Sound Preferences

Firefox add-on of the day: Grab and Drag

This add-on lets you click and drag anywhere on a page to scroll it, versus using your mouse wheel or using the scroll bar. It’s a bit of functionality lifted from Internet Explorer. I prefer it lately to the mouse wheel because it’s smoother, and allows for varied scroll speeds. It’s similar to just using the scroll bar, but you can grab the page anywhere. Great for use with a tablet pen, and it would also be nice with a touchscreen to emulate iPhone sweetness.

I recommend going ahead and using these 2 options, so as to leave your text selection and mouse gestures unmolested:

Grab and Drag preferences

After installing, notice also that the add-on has placed a hand icon in the upper right of your ‘Fox; clicking this will toggle the functionality on/off if you’d like. If you don’t like this icon, here’s how to remove it: right-click some dead space at the top of your browser (try right below the URL bar) and you should see a context menu with an option for Customize. Simply drag the hand icon into the pop-up window which has appeared, and it goes away, into that “sandbox”. Learn something every day.

There’s also a new link to the Grab and Drag preferences under the Tools menu, which you can disable in the add-on’s preferences.

Nab Grab and Drag here.