jaimebourne.com

Last week I wrote about the wonder that is sage, the magical Firefox plugin/rss reader. Today I read the Rebecca Blood bloggers on blogging piece on Heather Armstrong and I have one more thing to add to my spiel.

Dooce (which if you don’t read, you really should be) states in this interview that she doesn’t like RSS feeds because she likes to “read a blog in its surroundings, in its context” . . . “and I don’t like that RSS takes that away.” Now, she does have this right. Like I said in my entry, the basic layout in Sage is a page that sucks entries in, contents only, leaving layout elsewhere. I agree with Heather - Pamie’s new layout is just TOO pretty to not look at. Sage has a solution!

Sage is very very wonderful and powerful and did I say wonderful? Because, you see, there is this magical Sage pane, to the left. Don’t let the fact that the keyboard shortcut (Alt+S) dissuade you. (My kb shortcut doesn’t work, but I’m sure that’s something that is configurable somewhere in the depths of my browser.) So first you get around the keyboard shortcut by pulling the pane up yourslf. Tools –> Sage. It’s THAT EASY, people.

Have you clicked? Do you see the pane? I know you can probably figure the rest out yourself, but I really really want to make sure you don’t miss something important. Let’s start at the top. First make sure you have some feeds to pull. Sage gives you some by default, but if you’ve deleted those and find your Sage pane empty, let me show you something magical. Am I overusing the term “magical”? Tough.

See the magnifying glass? Click it. That magnifying glass tells Sage to look for feeds. Pick one. I haven’t decided what kind of feeds I like better, so I find that I just pick randomly now. So now you have jaimebourne.com/journal feeding into your Sage. Now, click on the the little thing with the arrows around it. Looks like of like a refresh button, doesn’t it? What do you know, it IS a refresh button! It goes and checks each site you’re following feeds for and then tells you if there’s something new. Now, this part is key if you, like Heather, are into reading a site with its original design intact. Make sure that in the options menu (still on the Sage pane) the “Show feed item list” thingy is checkmarked. This makes a little list below the list of feeds. When you click on a site, a list will appear below it - yes, it’s a list of individual entries. The bold ones are the entries that you haven’t yet read through Sage, on this computer, yet. See, so you then click the individual entries and the main browser pane gives you the actual page that the entry is on, instead of the aforementioned “content-only page”.

Someone tell Heather Armstrong she can use RSS feeds again.