Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

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.