Adding a Live Feed to Firefox

In an earlier article I reviewed Mozilla Firefox. Unlike Internet Explorer, Firefox comes with a very useful feature that automatically updates news stories and adds them into your bookmarks. Instead of going to a web page and reading the latest articles, Firefox lists the news articles right in your bookmarks so you can jump straight to the story you are interested in. This feature takes advantage of something called syndication, or a live feed. Sites such as this one that have frequent updates will make a live feed of their stories available to Firefox and other special news reader software.

This may not seem immediately useful until you realize how much time it saves. If you are interested in reading news stories on different sites, you know how long it can take to browse each of the sites. When you add a live feed to Firefox, it creates a "live" bookmark. The end result is that you have a listing of every new story listed right in your Firefox browser, you don't have to take the time to visit each page. You can skip the stories and web sites that don't interest you and focus on the ones that do.

Tutorial: Adding This Site's Feed to Firefox

Note: Since I moved this blog to its own domain, the pictures in the tutorial show "Paramount Digital Security" rather than "Technology for the Timid". The instructions remain the same and have been edited to reflect this change, but I didn't bother re-editing the pictures. Just use your imagination and assume they are correct!

Step 1: Open up Firefox and go to http://www.techforthetimid.com.

Step 2: Go to the View menu, Toolbars, and turn on Bookmarks toolbar (a check beside it means it is turned on, like this). Turning on the Bookmarks toolbar makes it easier and quicker to see how site feeds work.

Step 3: You should still be on the Paramount web page. In the bottom right of Firefox's status bar, you will see an orange icon (pointed out here). This means that Firefox has automatically detected that this site has a live feed, so you don't have to guess.

Step 4: Click once on the orange icon, and click on the menu that says "Subscribe to Technology for the Timid" It should look like this.

Step 5: From the box that appears, click on either of the arrow buttons and select Bookmarks Toolbar Folder (like this), then click OK.

Step 6: You should now see the Tech for the Timid icon on your Bookmarks toolbar like this. If not, go back to Step 3 and try again. When you click on the button, it will display all of the live story feeds like this.

It's That Easy

Now everytime you open up Firefox, it automatically updates each of the live feed sites on your toolbar for quick and easy news browsing. Try it with another site, such as http://news.bbc.co.uk/, which is the other live feed I have on my toolbar.

Live feeds in Firefox save time and effort in browsing your latest news feeds.