Display RSS feeds easily in your browser

If you’re looking for a way to display RSS feeds easily in your browser then look no further.

First off, if you are using Internet Explorer then please consider changing. At the moment it is not as standards-compliant as most other mainstream browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Opera etc) and it has more security vulnerabilities unless fully patched up-to-date. Even then, most exploits are targeted at IE, making it the least secure in my eyes. To get up-to-date, head on over to https://mozilla.org and download the latest and greatest version of Firefox. If you are installing Firefox and want to import your Internet Explorer bookmarks, it will offer you the choice during installation. Nothing in Internet Explorer is changed and you can always go back to it (if you really must!).

Once installed visit this page:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/rss-ticker/

and click ‘Add to firefox’ button, then ‘Install now’. Restart Firefox and visit your favourite website (pcrepairmansblog.com of course!). Look for the feed link, it may say ‘Feed’, ‘RSS’, ‘XML feed’ etc or may just have the RSS  icon like this: Display rss feeds easily in your browser

Now you have the ‘feed’ displayed in your browser. A feed is really just some live data that shows the most recent activity, so for a website it may show the latest articles and for a forum the latest posts etc.

At the top of the page, click on the “Subscribe now” button and you’ll now get the latest feed pushed directly to your browser.

 

Firefox rss ticker

 

Now you should right click on the ticker bar at the bottom and select ‘Options’. This is where you can remove some of the default feeds and set your preferences.  I like to have these settings:

rss ticker setup options

 

 

So you should now have a free feed reader and no need to swap software while you are browsing to keep up-to-date on your favourite sites. Most feeds can easily be brought into the browser and many site owners are oblivious to this fact so they don’t put up an RSS link or icon. Try the following combinations to get to their feed:

https://sitename/feed/rss
https://sitename.com/rss.xml
https://sitename.com/index.php?action=.xml;type=rss

Once you have it, let the site owner know they are missing a trick by not providing a link to it. Mine’s in the footer under ‘News feed’ and I also have a feed just for site comments. Have fun!

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