Firefox 103 - Live Bookmarks and a fleeting glimpse into RSS
To date, we’ve covered a basic intro to Firefox (Firefox 101) as well as Firefox extensions (Firefox 102). Today, for 103, we are gonna tackle the subject of RSS or news feeds and in particular, how Firefox makes use of them with its ‘live bookmarks’ feature.
If Firefox is brand new to you, do yourself a favour and check out the earlier articles in the series to get yourself up to speed and then join along with this one.
OK. So let’s take a look at this feature…
What is RSS?
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. In very simple terms it’s perhaps best described as ‘receiving news headlines or content from a website without actually visiting it’. RSS feeds are also referred to as News feeds. RSS feeds are ‘read’ by feed readers or ‘aggregators’.
The BBC explains RSS and news feeds quite nicely:
News feeds allow you to see when websites have added new content. You can get the latest headlines and video in one place, as soon as its published, without having to visit the websites you have taken the feed from.
Feeds are also known as RSS. There is some discussion as to what RSS stands for, but most people plump for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. In essence, the feeds themselves are just web pages, designed to be read by computers rather than people.
News/RSS feeds are most commonly used on blogs and news sites where the content changes regularly, although they can also be used on lots of different types of sites. RSS is a core component of the way Podcasts work - but that is the subject for another day…
Keeping up? Totally lost?? This will make more sense as we go along - believe me!
How does Firefox use RSS?
Firefox has a feature known as ‘Live Bookmarks’. With ‘Live’ meaning that they are constantly updated - as opposed to your normal bookmarks, which never change.
When added, a live bookmark displays the current stories or articles on a given website page at any time.
Firefox’s implementation of RSS only displays the story’s headings rather than any of the story itself. Traditional feed readers display a lot more info, but live bookmarks still have a place.
How do we know whether a site has an RSS feed?
Firefox is smart and is able to detect RSS feeds embedded on lots of websites automatically, but some need to located and added manually. As you are browsing around look for tiny little icons labelled: RSS, XML, ATOM and more. I’m sure you’ve seen them in your travels.
All of these icons, while slightly different all mean roughly the same thing - the page you are looking at has an RSS feed built-in.
If Firefox is able to detect a feed in a page, it will indicate the feed by showing the orange RSS icon at the right-hand end of the address bar.
OK. So that this starts to make a bit more sense, lets have a go at adding a live bookmark or two.
Adding a ‘live bookmark’ to Firefox
Firstly, lets visit a site that we know has an RSS feed. Wait a second - THIS site has an RSS feed! OK. Let’s begin by adding a live bookmark for Easy PC Tips since you enjoy the tutorials and tips so much and want to stay up to date and know when new articles are posted.
- Notice that the little orange RSS icon is displayed at the end of the address bar. Firefox knows about the RSS feed in this page. This makes things much easier.
- Hover your mouse pointer over the RSS icon and you’ll see a little tooltip pop up prompting you with a message to ‘Add Live Bookmark…‘
- Perhaps unsurprisingly, clicking the RSS icon reveals the ‘Add Live Bookmark‘ window, giving you the option to change the name of the bookmark as well as where it should be stored - ‘Create in‘.
- Change the name if you wish. This is something that helps you remember what the feed is about. It won’t break anything if you do change its name, so go crazy!
- Under ‘Create in‘, your new copy of Firefox is probably encouraging you to save bookmarks to your Bookmarks Toolbar Folder. This is a perfectly fine place to store live bookmarks, but I like to try to be a little more organised. Lets create a new folder…
- To the right of that window, click the little button displaying the down arrow. Doing so reveals a few more options.
- Click once on Bookmarks Toolbar Folder and then click the ‘New Folder‘ button.
- Give the new folder a name. I call mine ‘News feeds‘. If you want to be super-organised, you can also add a description for your folder, but this step isn’t really neccessary. Click OK to create the newly named folder.
- Notice that you now have created a new folder underneath the Bookmarks Toolbar Folder - this is where we want to store the live bookmark.
- Making sure you have the new folder selected (click on it once more to be sure). Now click the ‘OK‘ button to add the live bookmark.
OK. Done that. Now what’s special about live bookmarks?
All done? Now, look at the toolbar in Firefox underneath the address bar. Notice that the new folder you created is sitting there? Hover over it and the Easy PC Tips bookmark you created should be in there too. So far it looks like a normal bookmark. Agreed? Now, hover your mouse over that bookmark.
Voila! You should now be seeing a list of all of the most recent articles from Easy PC Tips. Clicking on each article will jump you straight through to that page.
From this point forward, Firefox will continually check the RSS feed on Easy PC Tips to see whether there are any new articles posted. If there are, your live bookmark will be automatically updated. Instead of visiting the site to see whats new, you can now just hover over your live bookmark to see what’s happening here.
Further practice
Visit a few news sites or blogs that you regularly read and look for the orange RSS icon.
Need a few more feeds to play with, check out the feeds on :
…for starters. You’ll find plenty more as you traverse the web. Just look out for the little RSS icon in the address bar.
Of course, for each live bookmark you add, you don’t need to create folders each time, but it makes sense to try and logically group your feeds together in folders to help keep them vaguely organised. Especially, once you get the hang of the concept and end up with say 50, 60 or 347 feeds!
In closing…
More and more sites are implementing RSS and Firefox’s live bookmarks are a great way of quickly scanning through a bunch of sites to see whats new and whether there’s anything of interest without having to visit the site.
Play with the live bookmarks feature and get used to the idea. Keep checking the RSS feed for Easy PC Tips as we’ll soon be covering RSS in a little more detail and recommended some feed aggregators…Enjoy.
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