Digitivity » Firefox

What Is RSS? An Introduction to Feeds and RSS Feed Readers

Digitivity — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 19:15:37 +0000

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.

It’s a handy way to get updates from the websites you want to keep apprised of.

Normally, to find out if a website you like has updated their content, you would have to remember to visit it every day. That’s a problem because some sites may update their content more often than once a day; others may update only occasionally. Either way, you’re either visiting too frequently or not enough. And, in any case, there’s no telling whether by the time you visit, they’ll have fresh content up:

or stale:

RSS to the rescue

RSS solves this problem. Instead of you going manually to a favorite website’s homepage, the website makes availble a special web address that you give to what’s called an feed reader. Located at the RSS web address is the “feed” of updated content.

Here’s an excerpt of what it looks like:

As you can see, each item of content has a title, a link, a date, and (not shown) either an excerpt or the full content of the posted article.

RSS feed readers

Obviously, you’re not going to be checking the RSS feed addresses manually. That’d be worse than manually checking homepages.

Rather, you enter the feed address into your feed reader, also called an RSS aggregator (because it brings together feeds from many websites into one convenient place).

The feed reader occasionally (usually hourly) checks your favorite websites to see if they have updated content. If they do, it’s indicated in some way in the feed reader. Usually, they use the same display format as popular e-mail programs like Outlook and Thunderbird. I.e., new and unread items are displayed with titles bolded. You can read the content right in the RSS feed reader, or click on the site’s URL to go there.

I can’t go into very much detail into any one feed reader in this article, because this is just an overview and introduction. I’ve listed one or two common and easy feed readers below for various platforms below to get you started.

For the most readers, after installation, you should be able to drag the RSS feed address to your RSS reader.

Finding the RSS feed address

Most websites have a prominent orange RSS icon which is linked to their RSS feed address. Just drag the icon to your feed reader. Or right-click on the icon and select (depending upon your browser), “Copy Link Address” or “Copy Shortcut Address”. Paste that address into your feed reader.

If you can’t find the RSS address link, many feedreaders will automatically find the RSS feed address once you enter the main homepage address (such as http://digitivity.org/).

Windows feedreaders

FeedReader (that’s the name) is a free and open source RSS reader for Windows. It’s a very small download (2.7 MB), and it has a simple interface which is fine for RSS newbies:

Feedreader RSS Feed Reader for Windows

Ubunutu/Linux feedreaders

Liferea is, like Feedreader, a simple and easy-to-use RSS aggregator. Just drag a site’s RSS icon to the Liferea window and it’ll create a subscription for you. Liferea is only available for Linux. Liferea is a supported application in the Ubuntu repositories. Click here in Firefox to install Liferea on Ubuntu.

Liferea RSS Fead Reader for Ubuntu/Linux

Apple Mac OS X feedreaders

Vienna is a nice, full-featured RSS feed aggregator application for Apple Mac OS X which is also free and open source. According to Michael Ströck of the Vienna project, it is “is a completely native OS X application written in Objective-C/Cocoa.” The 2.4 version of Vienna was just released yesterday:

Vienna RSS Feed Reader for Mac OS X

Cross-platform feedreaders

The advantage of a cross-platform feed reader is that you don’t have to learn a new program as you move from computer to computer.

Firefox

Firefox offers an RSS feed reader built right into the browser. When you’re at a site you want to subscribe to, just click on the RSS icon on the right side of the location bar:

Firefox RSS Live Bookmarks

RSSOwl

RSSOwl is a free and open source Java-based RSS aggregator that works on Windows, Linux/Ubuntu, and and Mac OS/X. It has a lot of features you might want after you progress beyond the simple feed readers.

RSSOwl RSS Fead Reader (Java-based)

BlogBridge

BlogBridge is a free and open source Java-based RSS aggregator that works on Windows, Linux/Ubuntu, and and Mac OS/X. It also has a lot of features you might want after you progress beyond the simple feed readers.

BlogBridge RSS Fead Reader (Java-based)

Web-based RSS feedreaders

Some people prefer web-based feedreaders because it gives them the ability to access their favorite sites’ updated content lists from anywhere.

Some popular web-based RSS feed aggregators include:
MyYahoo
Google Reader
Bloglines
Netvibes

What is Atom, and how does it differ from RSS?

Atom is another web feed format. It differs slightly from RSS. In the early days of web content syndication, there was a kind of rivalry between the two as to which would prevail. But these days, both exist in a kind of relaxed truce. Both have different advantages, and almost every feed reader supports both formats, so you don’t really have to bother with the intricacies of the two.

Google Chrome Browser Third Place Behind Internet Explorer and Firefox

Digitivity — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 17:05:37 +0000

A new survey is showing that Google’s Chrome browser is moving to third place in the browser standings.

Granted, the percentage for Chrome is nowhere near Internet Explorer, but I still think this is important.

The most important lesson is: You should code your websites to HTML standards as opposed to targeting a single browser’s quirks (like IE 6.0).

It’s a mistake to dismiss Google Chrome because it doesn’t have a lot of market share at the moment. Firefox likewise didn’t have a lot of market share, but it’s at about 25% right now. Who in their right mind would turn away 1 out of 4 of their customers?

But I think Google can increase its market share much more rapidly. For one thing, they can promote Chrome on their websites, like they’re doing on Youtube now. The number one video site on the Internet telling people to download Chrome gives it instant credibility.

In addition, Google can promote Chrome outside the digital sphere, as they are doing on the busses of certain cities currently. If Google can make google a household word, Chrome’s not too far behind.

Resources

Download Google Chrome here.
Slashdot discussion
Browser survey
ComputerWorld article

Firefox 3.0.9 Released

Digitivity — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:37:58 +0000

Mozilla has released Firefox 3.0.9.

New features of this release include:

Bulgarian, Marathi, and Occitan Firefox versions are available
Fixes for some security issues
Fixes long submit time for big forms

Download the latest Firefox here.

Firefox 3.0.7 Released

Digitivity — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 11:49:32 +0000

Mozilla has released Firefox 3.0.7.

New features of this release include:

Estonian, Kannada, and Telugu Firefox versions are available
Fixes for several security issues.
Fixes a missing cookies problem
Fixes a problem with File menu items going missing after printing

Download the latest Firefox here.

Firefox 3.1 Beta Has New, Faster TraceMonkey Javascript Engine

Digitivity — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 11:49:35 +0000

InfoPackets reports that the Firefox 3.1 beta is getting faster at JavaScript and CSS rendering. It’s going to need it for upcoming competition from Google Chrome and Microsoft IE.

But the original article‘s test numbers aren’t quite promising. While Firefox 3.1 may be faster than previous Firefox versions, it’s still slower than the current Safari beta.

HowToCreate.co.uk CSS rendering benchmark: Firefox 3.1 beta loads in 456 ms and renders in 38 ms. Safari 4 beta loads in an amazing 54 ms and renders in 7 ms.
Sean Patrick Kane’s JavaScript test: 344 ms for Firefox and 174 for Safari.
Acid3 standards compliance test: 93 for Firefox and 100 for Safari.

Sorry to say, but this is really pathetic performance. Here’s hoping the Firefox devs can bring their game up by release time.

Firefox and Chrome Complicate Mozilla and Google Ties

Digitivity — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 11:53:24 +0000

In a Computerworld article, Mozilla CEO John Lilly calls the non-profit’s relationship with Google “complicated.”

The story is being discussed on Slashdot here:

Slashdot | Chrome Complicates Mozilla/Google Love-In

See, it used to be that Mozilla made the Firefox browser, Firefox’s default search box went to google.com, actually a special page at Google, and Google gave Mozilla a percentage of advertising revenue from ads displayed or clicked through from those search pages. This revenue amounted to millions of dollars over the course of the deal.

But all was well, since Google and Mozilla were partners against the evilll Microsoft. Now things are a little more complicated since Google has come out with its own browser, Chrome. So naturally, Mozilla is saying that it’s not just Google that could be the default search engine for upcoming Firefox versions; there are other paying suitors, as well.

I think all of this is part of a negotiation dance, and I think Google and Mozilla will end up together after all, but they still need to let each other know (via the media) that they each have other options.

Firefox 3.0.5 Released

Digitivity — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:12:03 +0000

Firefox 3.0.5 has been released. This is a minor relase that

Fixes some security and stability issues
Offers releases for the Bengali,
Esperanto, Galician, Hindi, and Latvian languages.
Some other small changes

If you’ve turned automatic updates off, you can get the latest release at the URL below:

Mozilla Firefox 3.0.5 Release Notes

WordPress Cutline Theme Resizes Image in Internet Explorer but not Firefox

Digitivity — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 14:03:53 +0000

I was using the Cutline theme for this blog. After adding images in some posts, I observed that the images overflowed the area allotted for posts horizontally. That was in Firefox, in which I normally work.

But when I happened to view the same post in Internet Explorer, I observed the image was resized to be smaller, specifically 490px.

The image tag looks something like:

Strangely, according to a few Google searches, Firefox supports the max-width property and IE doesn’t. Then again, the full sized image isn’t even 800 pixels, so it shouldn’t need to be resized. It must be something else that is making IE feel the need to resize the image.

As well, the downsized image doesn’t look so good in IE:

Installing Firefox 3

Digitivity — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 13:15:02 +0000

OK, I finally took the plunge and decided to install Firefox 3. I had been holding off because all my addons weren’t all supported for Firefox 3.

They’re still not all supported, but as time goes on, Firefox 2 support is going to be dropped at some point, and I may as well upgrade on my own terms as opposed to being forced to do so all of a sudden by lack of security updates at some point in the future.

Things to keep in mind:

Close out all unnecessary windows and tabs before you start the upgrade process.

After everything (including upgraded addons) has been installed, Firefox reloads all the websites you had open when starting the upgrade process. If you had a lot of tabs open, it may take a long time to load them all back up again. On the other hand, if you have tabs open that you need to refer back to, it’s better to bookmark them all (Ctrl+Shift+D) on the very small chance that Firefox might crash or otherwise not start up again after re-install.

Firefox 3 looks and acts differently in some respects, so prepare to be flexible.

The look of the top menubar and the navigation bar is different. The address box works quite a bit differently.

Here are some screenshots from the upgrade process in case you’re curious: