Saturday, March 27, 2010

Subscribing to RSS Feeds Using Firefox with Mac OS X

I guess most individuals cringe, when they see or hear the terminology 'RSS feed', thinking that it is some complicated and extremely technical feature that the average user might feel intimidated to use.

In actuality, it is fairly easy to use and offers the user a means to store an aggregate of topics from one source together to use later. It can provide a very easy method for audio podcasts to be saved to your iTunes library. Thus allowing you to listen to these podcasts or blogs at a later time, possibly while exercising on a treadmill or while out for a walk while listening via your iPod.

Most podcasters or audio sites offer the RSS feed button on the site. If the user clicks on this button, it provides a method to 'subscribe' to that 'feed' or audio or blogs for future castings or broadcastings.

Where these feeds go, is usually where most users encounter  problems. The user should search his/her preferences for his browser of choice to set the place where these broadcasts, audio blogs are captured for future listening.

If using Firefox, this can be found under the 'Firefox' menubar, where the user clicks on Preferences and then selects the 'Applications' tab. The user should scroll the applications in the display window, looking for 'Podcasts', 'Video Podcasts', and 'Web Feed' to set from the 'Action' column the means to save the feed or podcast. The options are numerous and one can directly send to iTunes where the podcasts can be downloaded or synced with such devices as iPods or iPhones.


The 'Preview in Firefox' option will allow the user to see a replication of the page where the images, mp3 files, and descriptive text that accompany the podcasts/feeds are displayed in an open Firefox Browser window. From this view, the user can also download the mp3 from the browser viewing window directly to their hard drive if desired and then moved to iTunes manually to be synced later.

Safari also has RSS feed capability, as do most  browsers.  Check it out you might find it to be a useful way to keep track of news feeds, interesting blog or audio casts to listen to at a future time.

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