Started Subcribing to XML Feeds (7th February 2006)
After upgrading to Firefox 1.5 I decided to browse for some new extensions to try out. I noticed that there was a shortlist of contestants for the best Firefox extension, so I had a look through to see if any seemed useful. I noticed a lightweight feed reader called Sage and decided I may as well give it a go to see what all this fuss about feeds has been about.
Wow, it was well worth the small 137kB download. Sage downloads the XML feed using its own discovery method or by using the inbuilt Live Bookmarks feature of Firefox. It uses a sidebar to let you navigate between the feeds you have bookmarked and displays the feed contents as a simply styled web page in the current tab. It even lets you create your own stylesheet for it and since the default two-column display was a bit cramped for my liking I linearised it.
It’s a great little extension and I’ve now realised that the hype about feeds is justified. I’d recommend it to anyone who has Firefox but hasn’t gotten tried out feeds yet.