Sage Extension

After you install Sage using the link above, close all of your browser windows and restart Firefox. Press ALT-S to open the Sage sidebar. You will see something like this on the left site of your browser:

Sage comes configured with a couple of RSS feeds, such as one from the BBC News. Click on the BBC feed in the sidebar. You will see a list of news article titles in the lower part of the sidebar, and a summary of each news article in the main browser window. Now you are using RSS! Whenever you are at your computer and want a quick summary of the latest news, you can just press ALT-S from within Firefox to open Sage, and then click on the BBC News feed.

Notice in this closeup that I have configured Sage to keep track of several RSS feeds from different web sites. There are many web sites out there that offer RSS feeds. BBC itself has many RSS feeds on different news topics. If you want to know if a web page has an RSS feed, look on the page for an orange box that says "RSS" or "XML" on it like the ones below from the BBC web site. The symbol for the RSS feeds are indicated by the black arrow:

An easier way to find RSS feeds on a page is to let Sage find them for you. Just use the magnifying glass button (as shown below by the black arrow), and Sage will let you know if the page has any RSS feeds. There is also a button to the left of the magnifying glass that checks your list of feeds to see which ones have new content added.

RSS Panel Extension

Another good RSS extension for Firefox is RSS Panel. When you visit a web page with an RSS feed on it, an orange box will appear in the top left corner of the page like this:

When you double-click on the orange bar, it opens to reveal the list of articles in the RSS feed. Clicking on a title will take you directly to the article.

RSS Resources

RSS is a useful tool that is going to become very popular in the future. It will be integrated into the next version of Windows that is due to be released in 2006 and that will do a lot to push RSS into the mainstream. But you don't have to wait until then to get started with RSS.

This page is just a brief introduction to RSS and I recommended experimenting with the two RSS extension mentioned above. A few good sites for RSS feeds are listed below:

• BBC News -- BBC has a large selection of good feeds. This is a good page to start with because it also has a good introduction to RSS.
• Feedster.com -- A search engine for RSS feeds.
• Firefox Extensions -- There are a few RSS feeds on this page that will keep you updated about new Firefox extensions and themes.
• Slashdot -- "News for Nerds."
• Craig's List -- RSS is a great way to keep track of your favorite categories on Craig's List.
• Search Engine Watch -- There are several feeds here for people who like to keep track of search engine news.
• Lonely Planet Thorn Tree -- Stay updated about new posts in Lonely Planet's travel advice forums.
• NPR -- National Public Radio (USA) has dozens of RSS Feeds ranging from news to world music.
• Wikipedia.org -- If you are interested in more background reading on RSS, try Wikipedia.