Everybody is all excited about the new Firefox 1.0 Release Candidate. In particular, the “Live Bookmarks” feature, which adds items from RSS feeds as special bookmarks. It uses RSS autodiscovery to add a convenient button in the statusbar, which allows you to easily subscribe to a page. Cool.
But I think I’m more excited about the addition of RSS support in Thunderbird 0.8. I mainly use RSS as a way to stay abreast of new material on web sites that I don’t visit regularly in my browser. And I really don’t use the browser’s bookmarks on a regular basis anyways. For me, bookmarks are auxilliary memory storage for stuff that I know I’ll need to look at again in the future, without having to re-google for it.
RSS is especially useful for keeping up with sites that don’t update very often. Or in some cases, sites that update very frequently. I’ve been a user of SharpReader for some time now, but I might just find myself doing all my feed aggregation in Thunderbird from now on.
They still need to make it a little easier to subscribe to feeds, though. Perhaps soon we’ll see a Mozilla extension that adds a “Subscribe in Thunderbird” button to the menubar. And of course, OPML import would be good. But in the meantime, you can just drag-n-drop a feed link from your browser into your Thunderbird “News & Blogs” folder.
What’s that? You don’t have a “News & Blogs” folder? Just go under the Tools menu to Account Settings, and create a new account. You’ll see an option for the new “RSS News & Blogs” account type.
6 Comments
Can’t let the day go by without thanking you for this post (and the rest of course). Having recently switched to Firefox (and Thunderbird btw) I ran to try the RSS autodiscovery tool and have put several links straight into the bookmark toolbar. IT ROCKS! OMG I’ve just noticed the alternate styles button alongside the RSS button in the status bar!! Browser heaven!
I too, am excited about the Thunderbird RSS support. But, I was wondering if anyone else is seeing the same problem I am. I have a bunch of subscriptions, and they worked fine when I subscribed, but I cannot seem to get them to refresh!!! Anyone seen this, or know what I have screwed up??
Thanks,
Ken
Did you make sure that the “Check for new articles every XX minutes” setting was turned on? It’s under the Account Settings for News & Blogs.
I wouldn’t guess it will be very long at all before we have not just an autodiscovery-to-T-bird extension, but autodiscovery-to-every-aggregator: I went looking for the code, to see why it wasn’t working quite right, and there’s nothing to it, nothing at all. addEventListener for DOMLinkAdded, it’ll call you with an object for each link element, all in easy-peasy Javascript. A little XUL for a menu, or just steal it from Live bookmarks, a little CSS or an image, you’re done.
YAR! Thankye Mr. Campbell fer th’ tips on Thunderbird RSS and th’ reminder o’ the piratic weekend ahead!
Can you still drag-n-drop a feed link from your browser into your Thunderbird “News & Blogs” folder?
I used to be able to do this, but have since upgraded to version 1.02. I miss this feature, and haven’t been able to do it for a long time.
Thanks for the update.
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Simon tried it, so did Kae, now I’m about to try it. Download Firefox and play with the live bookmarks stuff! Later - Dougal uses Thunderbird to RSS feeds. That’d make more sense for me too. I’m install Thunderbird 0.8 as we speak!
News & Blogs†folder? Just go under the Tools menu to Account Settings, and create a new account. You’ll see an option for the new “RSS News & Blogs†account type. [IMG Get Firefox!] View source article
no OPML importation support. Sure, you can export to OPML, but that does nothing for me and my 43 feeds in NetNewsWire that I need to import into Thunderbird 1.0 in OPML format to make it worth my time. Verified lack of OPML import support here and here . Uninstalled Thunderbird 1.0 for Windows. Yay NetNewsWire! Yay OS-X!