Feed Sidebar: Getting Started
Note: watch the Feed Sidebar section of my blog for information on updates to this extension.
The Feed Sidebar is an extension for the Mozilla Firefox Web browser that displays the new items from your Live Bookmarks in the sidebar. It is intended to be a lightweight extension of the RSS capabilities already included in Firefox, not a completely new feed management system.
Installing the Feed Sidebar will add a new sidebar to Firefox that displays the unread items from the feeds that you have bookmarked in Firefox. Clicking on an item will show a preview in the bottom of the sidebar, and double- or middle-clicking will open the item in the browser and remove it from the sidebar. The Feed Sidebar will also notify you of broken or unavailable feeds, something which I wish Firefox did in a more obvious manner:
You can choose to show items that you've already read:
You can filter your feeds with the search bar:
The toolbar buttons perform the following tasks:
- Open All in Tabs
- Mark All as Read
- Set maximum age for feed items
- Stop current update
- Reload feeds
- Change update interval (reload button dropdown)
You can access the options from the context menu:
The latest version of the Feed Sidebar is version 3.0.
If you're having trouble using the extension, you can
- Contact me (@cfinke) on Twitter
- Fill out a bug report
- or e-mail me at cfinke@gmail.com.
Christopher Finke is a software engineer. He is available for birthday parties and bar mitzvahs. 
July 6th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
Mr.Chris...I no under stand blogging. and would like to be n-formed. so if you feel the urge to typo a novice{stupid} page fur us heir dumb peoples. GREAT ! OR REPLY TO MY EMAIL gREAT ! THANX
July 6th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
Great, quick to read, informative
July 7th, 2008 at 4:41 am
Great addition, much thanks!!
July 7th, 2008 at 6:40 am
hi!
How can I add new RSS manually?
Program doesn't add this feed,
http://www.omeugps.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=4&func=rss&no_html=1
Main site,
http://www.omeugps.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=4&func=select&id=3
Regards
July 7th, 2008 at 8:07 am
Hi -- Some blogs that I add disappear. Others that I have deleted reappear. What am I doing wrong?
July 7th, 2008 at 10:08 am
Chris: I came back to FF - after dropping v2 for Opera - with the debut of v3. Not only am I thrilled with its performance, but it seems to have given new life to extension development. And your Feed Sidebar app is a great example, filling a large hole in FF's utility. FS is simple yet very effective, making my feed-aggregation much more productive and just plain easier. Great job! That said (yeah, there's always a 'but'), I've noticed a couple things and wonder if they are merely figments of my ignorance. For instance, I know I can mark a single feed-result as 'read' via context-menu or sidebar icon. But is there no way to mark as 'read' _all_ articles from any given feeder, rather than all results (from all feeders) at once? You know, just the stuff from AOM but not from MOZDEV. It seems an intuitive option, given the handy filtering...imagine my shock when 50 feeds vanished! :LOL: And does FS not automatically retrieve feeds at open, but only at the set intervals? Again, it seems like a more natural flow, to me. One, more thing: when the sidebar preview includes video, weird things can happen when you then open a _second_ feed-result in the adjacent tab. Not sure of the exact sequence, but I ended up with the audio track still playing despite the video not showing in _any_ tab. (Wouldn't stop until I closed FS.) None of these issues is critical, but I look forward to hearing from you. Again, thanks so much for your efforts!
July 7th, 2008 at 10:17 am
MrF: You can mark all items from a single feed as read by right-clicking on the feed title and choosing "Mark Feed as Read." (The option doesn't show up if you click on one of the feed's items; you have to click on the feed name itself.)
It does only check for updates on set intervals in order to avoid slowing down Firefox; if you restart Firefox, it should however restore all of your feeds from last time, so the sidebar should always be up-to-date with the feeds from the last update.
I'll look into the bug with video; sounds like an interesting one.
July 7th, 2008 at 10:47 am
Thanks for the fast response, Chris. :-)
Ok, now I see the revised context menu. But I was pointing out that each, individual item includes a 'Mark All as Read' menu-option. This seems relationally discontinuous to me - shouldn't 'all' to refer to that particular feed (one step up the tree), rather than to all?
And when I wrote about retrieving feeds 'at open', I meant 'when opening Feed Sidebar'...ie: during an ongoing FF session. Generally, I leave FS closed and set for a 30 min. update-interval. I was surprised to see no (unscheduled) FS update, when specifically invoked.
Hope this clears up my original points. Good luck reproducing the video glitch - I'm watching for it, myself. And speaking of which, I would love to see 'Open in New Tab' (or maybe a small context menu) in the preview area, to spare me covering some extra territory, with my mouse.
July 7th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
Why can I not get rid of this I have deleted it 5 times!
July 9th, 2008 at 7:50 am
please let me downgrade.
July 9th, 2008 at 8:29 am
error: You can install an older version at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addons/versions/4869
July 9th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
You might want to include clickable headings, so that one can Apple+Click (Control+Click) and open them in the new tab, without doing two steps, Right Click, Open in a New Tab... Thanks for the nice work done...
Zoran
July 22nd, 2008 at 3:20 am
Dit is voor mij heel verwarrend en ik snap er niet veel van. Ik heb alles in mijn computer in het nederlands!
I don't understand this good and I have everything in mijn computer in dutch!
July 22nd, 2008 at 4:05 am
I'm not sure if it's been requested already but I would love to organize feeds into folders. I have a lot of feeds and like to have them categorized as I do in all my other feed readers such as Thunderbird (and even plain Firefox livemarks!).
This the only thing stopping me from replacing my other feed readers completely with Feedbar (it is quite an important feature to me) but, beside that, this is a great extension and I'm sure will prove to be very useful to me.
Many thanks.
July 24th, 2008 at 7:35 pm
Sorry; I am still in trying to understand this new setting. I have been using yahoo for a while, (my e-mail, yahoo answer, shopping etc. I do not know what happen with my e-mail address and all. I am still in the look-out.
August 4th, 2008 at 4:40 am
you did a really good job!
August 7th, 2008 at 8:15 am
THanx, a really great add-on. One suggestion is the moveability of the headers (shift them up or down). I prefer one feed, but I cannot put it on top.
Keep up the good work.
August 26th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
I love this Firefox. And after using MSN for so long, I'm finding my way around. This is exciting. Thanks
August 27th, 2008 at 3:32 am
Excellent job. I love it
August 28th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Hello,
i have installed the feed sidebar with ff3.01 and a falure xml message is shown. what went wrong?
Best regards
September 7th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Nice add-on, works well, is simple, good looking, and reliable.
Nothing more than you need, but useful as hell!
Thanks!
September 29th, 2008 at 4:17 am
merci beaucoup, c'est extra de voir les messages qui arrivent les uns à la suite des autres...j'habite dans un pays avec 11h de décalage par rapport à la France
October 16th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
It would be useful if there was a button I could add to the sidebar to show the feeds, rather than using the drop down menus or a keyboard shortcut.
October 19th, 2008 at 8:36 am
never used rss as i didn't find it useful. but since i found your add-on i finally understand how useful it is. great add-on. thanks
October 19th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
Is there a way to import an OMPL file?
Looks great otherwise--just don't want to add stuff by hand.
-Jacob
October 28th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
is there a way to import my feeds from flock? I have them in a ompl file.
November 15th, 2008 at 6:06 am
15 JUTA RUPIAH,KHUSUS BAGI PEMULA ONLINE...!!!
November 25th, 2008 at 2:19 am
2
February 6th, 2009 at 6:35 am
This is a great add-on, but I want few things in it, 1. Like flok browser, it should display the numbers of rss items found on the page in the tooltip window, and close it automaticly, 2. Internet explorer like interface, where we can read the small portion of the fead, and see the actual rss url. Thank you.
February 12th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
Yup. This is very nice and useful!. :) Thanks for providing.
February 13th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
Hi
I have a problem I couldnt resolve in weeks. I have three computers, all running
same firefox version.
But two of them (the ones I need for this) download the yahoo finance basic charts
incompletely.
e.g.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ta?t=5d&l=off&z=m&q=c&p=m100%2Cm200%2Cm100%2Cm50&a=&c=&s=cpla
often it downloads the page only with the 5 day chart, and omitts the other charts (3weeks etc). after clicking severaltimes it displays correctly.
Bt it happens often. For some reason my Dell Laptop doesnt have this bug, but my
two compaqs and a Dell workstation have it. I have 2x xp, and 1x 98 , they all
have the same problem
axel
February 16th, 2009 at 10:38 pm
How do you set up numerous tabs to open when you open Firefox? IE does this as your numerous home page tabs, can it be done with Firefox as well?
February 17th, 2009 at 12:02 am
My first computer that is actually up to date. Firefox rocks!!!!!
February 26th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
I am new with FireFox . Can someone explain why the fovorite option is not encluded
on the tool bar ? Favorits is not an option when clicking on the tools preference .
thank you
new user
February 27th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Feed FOLDERS, please!
March 2nd, 2009 at 6:34 pm
I LIKE THE SIDEBAR
March 4th, 2009 at 7:10 am
I NEED SMTH. TO BE ABLE TO COPY + PASTE ALL MY BOOKMARKED ADDRESSES (MENU + TOOLBAR)IN ORDER TO PUT/PRESERVE THEM ALL ON A DVD (NOT TO COLLECT THEM ALL BY DRAGGING ON MY PERSONAL EMAIL PAGE AND SEND IT BACK TO ME, IN CASE I CHANGE THE COMPUTER AND I MUST START ALL OVER. ITS HARD TO MEMORIZE ALL MY URL ADDRESSES.
March 4th, 2009 at 11:45 am
How I have the the toolbar both horizontally and vertically. How to I delete one without deleting the other?
April 14th, 2009 at 2:18 am
yeah, i like this sidebar..
April 19th, 2009 at 4:16 am
You desperately need to add a button to fold and unfold all feeds. It's a pain opening the feed and having all folders open and having to scroll through infinite feeds to get to the one you want, or closing each folder sequentially until you get to the feed you want. Total waste of time until this feature gets added. You efforts are appreciated though.
June 18th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
I just installed my new laptop but can't find a Firefox extention I had on my old machine. It took away the names of my tabs (but díd appear when the mouse moved over them). It also automatically sorted my tabs alphabetically. Does anyone remember the extention? I do not seem to find it on FF.
Thanks guys,
Peim, RB*
* Registered Blonde