“Apple has turned Safari, the Mac OS X Web browser, into an RSS [“Rich Site Summary” or “Really Simple Syndication”] reader. Combining RSS with the browser makes overwhelming sense, because you don’t have to flip back and forth between the headlines in one program and the full articles in your Web browser,” David Pogue writes for The New York Times. “(Firefox, an outstanding free browser for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, integrates RSS feeds in a very similar way, although without as much flexibility as what you’re about to read.)”
Pogue writes, “Here’s how life with Safari works. Any time you see an RSS logo appear in the address bar, Safari is telling you that you’ve stumbled onto a Web page that offers an RSS feed. (That’s handy, because it’s not always easy to tell if a page does or not.) Of course, you can also seek out RSS sites using Web sites like Feedster.com and Technorati.com.”
“If you click the RSS button, you enter Safari’s RSS-reading view: a scrolling “front page” containing all of the tidbits (articles, blog entries) from that Web page. A clever Article Length slider expands or shrinks all entries simultaneously, from full-length articles, with photos, to headlines only. Searching and sorting controls await at the right side,” Pogue writes. “Now here’s where it gets interesting. Exactly as in Firefox, you can bookmark this RSS feed. From now on, your Bookmarks menu (or Bookmarks bar) lets you know how many new articles have been published on the Web site you subscribed to–you’ll see, for example, “NYtimes.com (7)”–so you don’t waste time visiting pages where there’s nothing new.”
Pogue goes on to explain even more cool things you can easily do with Safari’s RSS features in his full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: Our RSS Feed time stamps have been fixed. For Safari 2.0 users, look for the blue RSS button in your address bar when visiting our site. For other browser users, our RSS feed is: http://www.macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/rss_2.0
[UPDATE, 5:12pm ET: We are working on the RSS link issue, so that one click of the RSS link will take your directly to the full article with Reader Feedback. We’ve been tinkering with how our RSS is generated in order to fix the time stamps and this is a new version. We’ll get it fixed ASAP. Thank you for your patience.]
[UPDATE, 5:35pm ET: The link issue in our RSS feed has been fixed. Times stamps from this point on should also be accurate and match the site’s time stamps. Thank you.]
OK, MDN. What’s up? When I come here via a link in my RSS reader it takes me to your page where I see a one-liner about the topic, followed by a “Full Story” link that takes me to the real story. That first page also has tons of ads and stuff down both sides of the page. So now it takes me 2 page loads to get here. Didn’t do that before today.
Don’t make me have to do that please.
I, too, do not like how you have to click on a news story in RSS to read the whole thing. I think it should all be available via RSS. But then MDN’s advertisements don’t really do much good.
So please, allow us to read the whole story and comments via RSS.
I’ll agree, the switch in your RSS from using the comments page to using an article summary is a bit discerning. At first, I though you guys stopped adding the MDN take on the article, since I assumed the [full story] link was going to take me to the actual article. I prefer the old method much more. The summaries should only be used on the index.php page.
Now onto the article, Safari RSS sounds cool. Better than NetNewsWire no, but I admit to having to hate opening a separate application to get my newsfeeds. Since Konfabulator was introduced, and I started to use MultiNewsReader, I typically only look at the News Feeds handled by that (5 sources) instead of the 48 handled by NetNewsWire. I still think NetNewsWire is GREAT. I just hate having to launch it.
So soon, as I get Tiger installed, I’ll probably use Safari RSS, and reserve NetNewsWire for even less duty.
When I click on the ‘Read more…’ button I am take to an intermediate page which shows me the exact same 1 sentence summary I just read on the RSS page. Then I click the ‘Full Story’ button and I finally get to the article I wanted to read TWO CLICKS ago. I agree witht the above opinions, the full stories should be included in the RSS feed.
We are working on the RSS link issue, so that one click of the RSS link will take your directly to the full article with Reader Feedback. We’ve been tinkering with how our RSS is generated in order to fix the time stamps and this is a new version. We’ll get it fixed ASAP. Thank you for your patience.
The link issue in our RSS feed has been fixed. Times stamps from this point on should also be accurate and match the site’s time stamps. Thank you.
Hey MDN…
How is RSS affecting your bandwidth? Safari by default updates every 30minutes… is this too often?