Firefox Livemarks

 

One of the guys from work has just pointed out the Livemark feature of Firefox, which allows you to create dynamic bookmarks based on XML feeds.

  • Open the Bookmarks Manager dialog (Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks…).
  • Create a new livemark (File > New Livemark…).
  • Fill in the properties dialog with appropriate values and click OK. Try these:
    Name: “AskTom – Recently Updated”
    Feed Location: “http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/ask/ask_tom.newest.rss”
    Description: “Most recently updated posts on asktom.oracle.com.”

The resulting bookmark is dynamically generated from the contents of the feed.

I think it’s neat, but now I have to decide between Bloglines, Thunderbird and Firefox as my blog reader 😉

By the way, the blogger spellcheck tries to substitue the word “Asthma” for “AskTom” 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

5 thoughts on “Firefox Livemarks”

  1. Asthma, oh dear.

    Question – do any of the blog aggregators you’ve looked at let you know when comments have been added? for the blogs I read, I’d sort of like to know that, not just when the blog itself was updated.

  2. Bloglines get’s my vote. However, there’s no right answer for everyone, it all depends on your personal needs. I can read it from my PDA which is nice. I can also sync it with a lot of other applications – like feeddemon or doppler for podcasts. I also generate my blogroll from it using OPML. There’s a bloglines plugin for firefox which is quite good – helps to autosubscribe and also notifies you of updates to your feeds. You might also want to take a look at Sage for Firefox. I tried thunderbird for a while but I have two laptops, two PC’s and a PDA and trying to sync what I had and hadn’t read was a nightmare.

    In answer to your question Tom, most if not all aggregators can read comments and tell when they’ve been added. I use bloglines and it reads them. The issue is that not all RSS feeds have comment support i.e. you have to modify your RSS feed code so that it will display comments when being read by a feed reader. You may recall I suggested you make your feeds full text, a full text feed would include comments. You could also set up a separate feed for comments. Robert Scoble does that but I don’t think it’s ideal.

    Most blogs seem to by default exclude comments in the RSS feed. Mine excluded comments when I first set it up but I’ve amended the code to display comments as well – not sure what blogspot uses but you might want to take a look at Haloscan which also has trackback support for blogspot. I like using trackbacks and that’s one of the weaknesses I see with blogspot is that people don’t use trackbacks that much.

    As an example add my feed (http://www.oracleappsblog.com/index.php/weblog/rss_2.0/) to your reader, you’ll notice that one of my recent entries entitled “Installing, Upgrading And Maintaining Oracle Applications 11i” has a comment on it.

    Tom, I’ve noticed you have a lot of comments so it probably is quite important to include them in a feed of some sort. My personal feeling is that you should offer both full text and summary feeds to your readers and then in the full text feed include the comments. If you need any help getting your comments into your RSS feed give me a shout.

  3. Tom, I’ve noticed you have a lot of comments so it probably is quite important to include them in a feed of some sort. … If you need any help getting your comments into your RSS feed give me a shout

    I’m totally into keeping it short. All we’d need to inject into the feed would be “N comments associated with this blog” and let N change — that would be enough for a news aggregator to say “this changed”

  4. I’m sure that’s possible Tom – I know it could be done in ExpressionEngine, the blogging software I use. How it could be done in blogger I’m not sure. Perhaps haloscan?

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