Test of the "RSS Ticker" add-in for Firefox

For those of you not using Firefox, one of the best things about it is that people are constantly writing new plug-ins you can easily add. Some are cosmetic, some improve security, and some improve your productivity and keep you better connected.

RSS is a technology you can use with Firefox to subscribe to a web site or blog's posts. Firefox lets you click on a subscribed RSS feed and see the latest entries... but that wasn't easy enough for me.

I'd like new posts show up when anything new is added for the sites I am monitoring.  RSS Ticker 2.0.3 seems like it might do just that.

In tests tonight, it did scroll my news feed and posts from my blog. I was able to dismiss everything as read. It also has a setting you can set to hide the bar when there are no unread items. I have it checking every 2 minutes. Will it find this new post and display the bar?

Results: Yes, it worked. I click to read the post and the ticker goes away. So cool.

What happens if I update a post?

Nothing, with regard to the ticker. Updates are not seen by the RSS Ticker as new entries, so they will not be re-displayed once they are dismissed.

Does the feed/ticker show title changes?

Yes, if you are blogging on Wordpress.com and you make your change to your post's title before the RSS Ticker loads it, the person will see the change to the title of your post.

RSS feeds (and the orange logo) are all over the place.  If you want to monitor news, blogs, job listings, or anything else with an RSS feed, I recommend Firefox with the RSS Ticker add-in.

A few neat feeds (I'll add more as I find them). If you click the links below, you need a web browser that allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds.

RSS

• The CDC's swine flu RSS feed (RSS).


• The most popular technology bookmarks (RSS) currently being tagged by people on the delicious social bookmarking site is fantastic and can lead you to great new places.  (Or try some other category to suit your interests.)


• Create an eBay search which is an RSS feed and watch for new items.

Farecast, back in August of 2006 had an RSS feed so you could monitor cheap prices. I can't find it now. Perhaps it vanished when Micro$oft ate them?

Twitter: If you follow people on Twitter, you can keep track of all of them along with all of your other feeds by subscribing.  (You'll need to enter your twitter username and password when you click to get the RSS feed.) The Above Top Secret twitter feed is the most interesting I've found so far and includes links to stories.

Here is an example of what you will see in Firefox if you click an RSS links (actually there are two feeds on this blog, one for posts and one for comments, the image below is me subscribing to the comments so I can see them scroll by in the ticker as I work on other things).

After clicking the RSS link, click [Subscribe Now]. You will notice that you can check the box to have this feed show up in the ticker or not.