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exec summ
if you want to access your feedreader (aka newsreader, rss reader, etc) on different platforms, google reader is your best bet. however, to make sure I see all the news sources important to me every day, I prefer the sage reader (firefox only). here’s why, and how to set yours up.
got a favorite? do tell in the comments!
when I was first discovering the web back in the nineties, I came across a cool site called crayon.net. crayon.net used frames to create a sidebar with news sources. content would show up in the main frame. very nice for those who tend to get distracted and realize hours later they forgot to read the rest of the articles. my crayon page is still live. check out the too-cool title – I’m thinking about renaming the inapropros blog…
enter, stage left: firefox sidebar
fast-forward ten years or so (ok, it was probably around before, but I’m talking when I started using it). one useful feature in the firefox browser is the sidebar. a lot like a frame, but shinier and more seo-friendly. I mentioned a few posts back how to use google reader from the sidebar. it was cool, it worked ok, but I wasn’t completely delighted with it. I had tried the sage reader a long while back, but never got into it for one reason or another. I recently read something that made me want to take another look.
easier said than done, as it turns out. my first search for get an updated sage extension yielded only a snarky goodbye post from one of the project developers. I ended up finding the extension, but it wasn’t yet updated for FF 3.5. because I can be a little ocd, I continued to look and found an extension called sage too done by the same folks or maybe that snarky developer. anyway, it works!
setting up sage feedreader – basics
to set mine up, I copied the feed urls one at a time from my google reader into new bookmarks in sage. note that you do not need to create the feed in google reader first – I just had mine in there already. new feeds can be assigned to sage when you subscribe (for how to on subscribing to rss feeds go here)
copy feed urls
right click in top sidebar panel to create a new bookmark
paste the url into the feed address field
feed will show up as ‘new bookmark’ at first
right click in the top panel of the sidebar to create folders. then just drag and drop your feeds to organize them.
extra credit
one of the neat things I discovered about sage reader is that you can tweak how the feed pages look with css scripts. google ‘sage reader css’ to find some cool ones. here’s how my lifehacker feed looks using the ‘blu’ css script (go to the sage settings panel. in the feed rendering tab you will see the css checkbox and explorer to find scripts you’ve downloaded)
what’s your favorite? please comment!