February 08, 2005, 3:03 PM — Firefox's Live Bookmarks feature provides built-in basic support for web site news feeds. Live Bookmarks make it easy to incorporate them into your browsing, and Firefox's use of standards makes the feature easy for companies to support.
Live Bookmarks is a technology in Firefox that lets you view news feeds, in RSS or Atom form, as headlines within the browser. News feeds have become a popular tool for syndicating information about the highlights and updates at websites.
Using Live Bookmarks
Firefox automatically alerts you when you browse to a site that supports Live Bookmarks. It displays an orange icon in the lower right corner of the browser window that indicates that a news feed is available.
If you click on the news feed icon, Firefox will show a list of the news feeds available for the page, and let you subscribe to them. Once you have subscribed to a news feed, they are added to your bookmark sidebar. You can toggle the bookmark sidebar off and on using Ctrl-B.
Firefox displays the news feed as a folder with the bookmark list. Expanding the folder reveals the latest headlines from the site. Clicking on one of the headlines navigates the browser to the selected page.
Live Bookmarks can be added to the personal toolbar folder, too. Saving them there adds them to the Bookmarks Toolbar, at the top of the page, where they show up like any other bookmark. When you click on a live Bookmark, though, it brings up a list of the site's latest headlines.
You may find sites that have news feeds that Firefox doesn't automatically find. You can still add the feed as a Live Bookmark. Just go to the Bookmarks menu and select Manage Bookmarks. From the Bookmarks Manager, select File - New Live Bookmark. Name it and paste in the URL of the newsfeed, and you're done!
Supporting Live Bookmarks
Live Bookmarks is Firefox's implementation of RSS Auto-Discovery. The browser checks the HTML of web pages that you visit, looking for an alternate link reference:
This indicates that an alternate version of the page is available, that it's in RSS format, and what the alternate URL is. The alternate link information lets browsers like Firefox know where the news feed is located.
If your site already provides news feed summaries, supporting RSS auto-discovery and Live Bookmarks is easy. Add a link like the one above in the Head of your page's HTML. Make sure that link href points to your RSS XML file.
Testing it out is easy, too. JUst browse to your page with Firefox. If the page is set up correctly, the news feed alert icon should show up in the lower right corner of your browser.
Using Live Bookmarks can speed your web browsing, and make it easy to stay on top of news from many sites. Fortunately, supporting this Firefox feature is as easy as adding one line of HTML to your home page.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
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What are Live Bookmarks?
