News aggregation built into your browser!
If you’re using the latest version of Firefox (at the time of writing PR1), you might have noticed a small graphic labelled RSS in the bottom right hand corner of your browser.
A Live Bookmark
A Live Bookmark
You probably already know that RSS stands for “Rich Site Summary” (or “Really Simple Syndication”) and is one of the most common syndication formats for news and other dynamic information. In fact you may already be subscribed to your favourite news sites using one of the many RSS tools available. If you’re new to RSS, check out Mark Nottingham’s fantastic RSS tutorial at his site.
But what exactly are Live Bookmarks? Live Bookmarks are one of the latest features added to the award winning web browser, Firefox. Live Bookmarks are simply RSS feeds that can be displayed via your bookmarks. This is quite flexible since bookmarks in Firefox (and Mozilla) can be viewed using different methods such as in tabs, sidebar or directly from the main menu. To illustrate this clearer, I have added a few screen captures showing the stages of adding a Live Bookmark.
Adding a Live Bookmark
Adding a Live Bookmark
Live Bookmarks work by “subscribing” to an RSS feed (by clicking on the little RSS button, then selecting “Subscribe to”) which adds an entry to your bookmarks. When you access that particular entry it’s dynamically populates the container with the latest feed items (sometimes you can actually see this happening – you’ll see what I mean). Each bookmark item can then be clicked to take you direct to that article (or article page).
It really adds another dimension to your bookmark system, and we haven’t even touched on remote bookmarks and bookmark sharing! You can find out more about Live Bookmarks at Mozilla’s Firefox information site.
