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23 August 05

Family, friends, or anyone else, take note. In this article I am going to explain how to make use of my syndication feed so that articles I write here at The Colloquial Tongue (TCT) are in essence pushed to your Web browser rather than you having to remember to come here to read them.

[Much of this article was derived from my other article on exactly the same topic, How to Read the Live Journal Feed, which I published at Wion Design. This version here at TCT is written a little more clearly, if only a bit, and utilizes graphics to help clarify things a bit. I will continue to revise/simplify the instructions as I recognize how.]

Okay, let me first try and clear up this concept of syndication so you understand what I’m talking about.

What is content syndication?

Very simply, and with the understanding that we are talking about Web content, content syndication is the process of producing content (whether text or multimedia) at a given source location and making it more easily available to anyone else in the world who has an interest in using it (whether to read it, listen to it, or watch it).

You might be saying to yourself, hey, I can go to any Web site and read, listen, or watch anything I want already, what’s the difference? The difference is that you have to physically do that; you have to go somewhere else on the Web, and if you have a lot of favorite places, then your information hunting-and-gathering process can be quite time-consuming. Even more, you are likely to forget all the places you would like to go (the Internet is a very distracting place, to say the least). On the other hand, by taking advantage of content syndication, you don’t have to go searching anywhere or remember to do anything; the content of your liking is pushed to you, right to your browser or desktop application for you to skim, choose, and read as you desire.

How does Web content syndication work?

To be sure, content syndication does not just happen by magic, though technology can seem pretty magical at times; there needs to be two things in place to make it work.

First, a Web site that is producing content (such as TCT) needs to have a particular file in place. This file is often referred to as a “news feed,” or simply just “feed” (I will call it a feed from hereon). The feed is what does the content pushing, and “pushing” simply means making content available for collection by a particular application that can interprete (read) the feed.

The application I speak of is the other technical component that needs to be in place to make the syndication process complete, and this needs to be in the possesion of the content user (the person reading the articles being published), which is you. These applications have a technical term, but they are more easily understood and often referred to as feed readers, because that is what they do—they read the feed being syndicated from my Web site to your computer.

So, the first thing you need to do is get equipped with a feed reader application.

How to read the TCT feed, Sage style

As mentioned in the beginning of this article, I’m going to explain how to use a feed reader exactly as I do it myself when reading content from other sites. I am going to discuss feed reading with respect to using a nifty reader called Sage. If you follow the method I am about to describe, you will likely not be disappointed.

Step 1: Installing the Firefox Web browser

To begin, you are going to need to download—and start using—the Firefox Web browser (if you are not already using it) because Sage is actually an extension of the Firefox browser. (‘Extension’ meaning it extends the functionality of the browser.) If you are already using the Firefox Web browser, skip to step 2.

When downloading Firefox, simply follow the download wizard and do everything it suggests. Be sure to indicate that you want Firefox to be your “default” browser when the wizard asks you this question.

Step 2: Installing and setting-up the Sage feed reader

When you have Firefox in place, the next thing you need to do is download Sage. Sage happens to be an extremely satisfying feed reader. As with the Firefox download, simply use the download wizard to install Sage and do everything the wizard suggests.

After you have successfully installed Sage, you will need to close Firefox (if you have it open) and relaunch it again by clicking the new icon for it on your computer’s desktop. By restarting Firefox, you initiate Sage as an integrated extension accessible from the “Tools” menu in the Firefox menu bar.

However, you can make Sage even more accessible than that; you can actually add the attractive Sage button to Firefox’s button bar so that using Sage is just a button click away. To do this, simply use your mouse and right click anywhere in the Firefox menu bar where nothing is occupying space (e.g. to the right of the ‘Help’ menu). You will see a small pop-up with three items; click the last one called ‘Customize’. A window will appear that gives you button options that you can add or remove from the button bar. Look for the button that appears as a green feather... ... (or sage leaf perhaps?). Add the button to the button bar by simply dragging it to the position you want it to be.

Figure 1: Firefox button bar showing the Sage button positioned between the ‘Home’ (left) and ‘New Tab’ (right) buttons.

For example, Figure 1 shows all the buttons I am currently using in Firefox; you can see my Sage button positioned between the browser ‘Home’ button (white house with yellow roof) and the ‘New Tab’ button (white tab with green ‘plus’ sign).

Congratulations, you now have the fabulous Firefox browser and Sage feed reader…let’s put them to work.

Step 3: Introducing Sage to my feed link

Here at TCT, I have my feed file implemented in such a way that your Firefox Web browser will automatically detect the file. This is a good thing, and we will use this auto-detection to initially introduce your Sage feed reader to my feed file; thereafter, all content I write will be immediately available in your feed reader for quick and easy reading.

First, use Firefox and return to TCT, if you are not already there. Look in the very bottom right corner of the browser window; you should see a little orange button that looks like this .

Move your cursor over the the little orange button and hold it there a second. You will see a popup title that reads “Add Live Bookmark for this page’s feed.” Click the little orange button; another popup will appear that has one line of text, as follows…

Subscribe to 'The Colloquial Tongue :: RSS 0.92'... 

This line is the title to the link to my feed, and you will use this to save my feed link in your Firefox Bookmarks so Sage has access to it henceforth.

It is good practice to organize all feed links you collect under one top level folder in your ‘Bookmarks’ directory so you can easily find them later. I simply have a top-level folder called Sage Feeds which I organize all my feed links under. Let’s do the same thing for you now so it is done; you can always organize your ‘Bookmarks’ directory however you want to later.

Figure 2: The first ‘Add Bookmark’ popup, with the browse-to-folder button at right.

Figure 3: The second ‘Add Bookmark’ popup, with the New Folder button.

Figure 4: The Properties for ‘New Folder’ popup, which allows you to name your new folder for saving feed links.

First, click on the feed link title indicated above; a popup window called ‘Add Bookmark’ will appear that allows you to save the feed’s link to your Bookmarks directory (Figure 2). We still need to create your ‘Sage Feeds’ folder, so click the browse-to-folder button at the far right of the popup (Figure 2 indicates the button with a green circle).

A new ‘Add Bookmark’ popup will appear that gives you the ability to create a new folder in your Bookmarks directory (Figure 3). Click the ‘New Folder…’ button at the bottom of the popup (Figure 3 indicates the button with a green circle).

A third popup window will appear called ‘Properties for “New Folder”, which has a place for adding a folder Name and a folder Description (Figure 4). You only need to give your folder a name, the description is optional. In the Name field, replace the words New Folder by typing in *Sage Feeds*, then click the ‘OK’ button. The previous popup will reappear (Figure 3), but this time your new folder will be added to the list of Bookmarks and highlighted as well; simply click the ‘OK’ button and the TCT feed link will be added to your new Sage Feeds folder in the Bookmarks directory.

You now have the ability to save feed links to your Sage Feeds folder from any site you visit, so long as the site has a feed link for you to save. If a site has the feed implemented like I do here at TCT, you will know by seeing the little orange button in the bottom-right corner of the Firefox browser. If you don’t see the little orange button in the bottom-right corner, the site still may have a feed, but they just have not implemented it very nicely. You can still add it to your feed links manually though, and I describe this in the section following step 4.

Step 4: Seeing Sage in action

Now, to see Sage in its full glory, click the Sage button that you added earlier to the Firefox button bar (step 2). Your Firefox browser window will be divided into two regions, the right will remain a Web page view, and a new left region (much narrower) will be a folder/file tree view of all the Sage links you have collected to date. If you need to, navigate to the Sage Feeds folder that you created above in step 3. If your just doing this for the first time, then the only link you should see is the one for The Colloquial Tongue. Click the TCT link. The right Web view will change, producing a very organized reading list of all the Wion Design articles being served by my feed. The articles will be sequentially numbered in the view (1, 2, 3, ... et cetera), the first number represents the most recent article published, the second numbered article is the second latest article published, and so forth.

At this point it should be pretty clear what the benefits are here: As long as you have a feed link bookmarked, Sage will henceforth communicate with the source Web site and always update your article lists automatically. Never again will you have to go to a Web site to see if there is new content; you simply start Firefox, check your Sage feed links, and see from a quick glance if new content has been published; if it is, you read it right where you are at. This is Web content syndication at its simplest!

What if there’s no auto-detectable feed?

If a site you visit does not have the little orange feed button, but you know they have a feed link (indicated by way of another RSS, Atom, or XML link somewhere in their Web site), you can add their link manually to your Bookmarks list which then makes it Live for you thereafter.

To add the link manually to Sage, do the following:

1. Hover your cursor over the RSS, Atom, or XML link that might be available in the site (it doesn’t matter which one you select, Sage reads them all). Generally these links, if available, can be found in the bottoms of Web pages (such as in footers), or in right-side columns (again, generally the bottom).
2. Right-click the link (do not left-click). You’ll get a nice Firefox menu of options about how to handle links, select Copy Link Location. (If you left-click the link, you’ll either get a code view of the feed file, or you will get a download window asking you what to do with the file. Ignore both situations, back-out, and right -click the link as previously noted.)
3. In the Firefox menus, click the ‘Bookmarks’ menu, then select Manage Bookmarks (second from top).
4. In the resulting window, click the ‘File’ menu, then click New Live Bookmark….
5. In the resulting link properties window, paste the link you saved in step 2 above into the “Feed Location” box. Also, give the link a sensible name, and less importantly, a description.
6. The link will be saved in your bookmarks with the rest of the Live links. If it’s not in the right folder, you’ll can easily move it there using the ‘Manage Bookmarks’ utility mentioned above.

There you have it. If you try these instructions, let me know how it goes so I know where to improve them.

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