[TechTools] Sage: Feed Reader for Firefox

Sage: A feed reader for Firefox
Link: http://sage.mozdev.org/

Ah! Joys of blogging! :) With the recent digital publishing trend, it does seems that feeds are everywhere: From syndicated news, site updates, to blogs of your closest friends. (Especially blogs, it does seems like everybody is having one right now!)

I still remember that I used to visit these sites individually for the latest updates, as in your typical "Open bookmark and browse through the main page), but as I'm having more and more sites to visit, it does seems really tedious to even open bookmarks for a short article or site update which contains less than 200 words. Well... that doesn't mean that I don't like to visit sites, it's just that I just need some way to get the latest site update news so that I'm able to know what site is worth checking it out for the latest content.

So site feed technologies such as ATOM and RSS* seems to be a god send, and Firefox provide site feed support through the use of Live Bookmark capabilities, and the small, orange RSS logo at the lower right hand corner of Firefox window to subscribe these feeds in a few clicks.

However, this is still not good enough: checking new site feed still involves me clicking the Bookmark menu item, scroll through the Live Bookmarks, and clicking on the dynamic links if I wanted to read the content. Hmmm... I would prefer some faster and more informative way to read these feed updates.

One of the more useful way to read your feeds is to have a dedicated feed reader, and now I'm using Sage, which is a simple Firefox feed reader extention. The greatest thing I liked about it is its simplicity and ease of use: It basically create a pane on the left side of the window, and all your subscribe feeds will be on the top part of the pane, while the details and updates are just below it. Checking on the site updates is as easy as selecting the feed on the top, and the list of news items will be listed below. And as an option, it'll open a page where it'll format these news item into a new page in your browser. Neat huh? :)

Guess I might just as well click away and see what's cooking in my RSS feeds :).

* Note: For those who don't know what RSS is, Wikipedia has a good explanation about the technology here.