an RSS how-to that you don’t want to miss

by D.O.

I had been thinking about doing a post about rss (are-ess-esse) feeds the past few days, then I saw the Super’s did one already. However mine will take a different approach. Read his to see what RSS feeds are… go… read…

In short, RSS will help you keep up with all your blogs without having to click every link from your blog twice daily. It checks them for you and tells you when changes have been made. Ok. My version of the RSS post will be a how-to concerning installation and usage of a RSS reader that you can use in firefox (which you should be using at this point in history).

Welcome to Sage. If you’d like you can install it as you read along. Just click the link, the “install” tab, then the “install” button. You will probably have to restart firefox (close and re-open) before Sage will work. No biggie.


The sidebar you see on the left of the mini-screen (click to enlarge) is what Sage will look like. If you don’t see any sidebar when you re-open firefox, just press Alt-S, or click the new button you have up in your URL bar (the colorful talk bubble icon).

Now your Sage sidebar should have three feeds automatically installed to it: BBC News, Yahoo! News – Sports, and Sage Project News. You may or may not care about any of those, but you probably do want to add your blogs… and here’s how.

Open up one of the blogs you read. At the top corner of the URL bar you will see this:

Which will open up something like this:


To which you will select the “Sage Feeds” folder, and click OK.

Repeat for all of the blogs you read, and in about ten minutes, you’ll have a nice looking list in your sidebar. Now when you open your internet you can press Alt-S (if you don’t leave Sage open all the time) which will open up your sidebar, and then click the little orange refresh button (see first pic) at the top left of the Sage sidebar.

Here’s the cool part:

The blogs on your list that have been updated will change from normal font to bold! You want to check the bold ones because they’ve got something new. You needn’t check the non-bold ones because they haven’t been updated.

Note: at first they will probably all be bold, because the reader doesn’t know that you’ve read the existing posts. Simply press Ctrl-Shift-C, and that should mark all of your feed items as read. Now you’re set. From now on, all the bold items are updated sites.

That’s it. If you have any questions let me know via comments, and if you actually do install it please let me know, because I’d like to think that the past 45 minutes of post-composition weren’t a futile effort.