Fun with Feeds and Safari

March 31st, 2008
By Noah (advertising, blogging, money, observations, resources, tips)

While I love Firefox, I’ve lately been using Safari (for PC) and finding it to be a guilty pleasure. For one, it sure seems to load pages much faster. It also displays text in a way that is very pleasing to the eye (ie. websites just look and read better). However, there is one simple difference that I’m really starting to take advantage of and it can really save time: default feed rendering. Default Feed Rendering, you say?

It likely won’t show up on anyone’s top 10 list of killer features for ANY browser. However, I’m finding the simple and useful way that Safari handles feeds to be very satisfying. I’m talking about how your browser displays an RSS or ATOM feed when you load it directly in your browser (as opposed to a seperate feed reader). An example of how this can save you time is by visiting the Smaller Indiana homepage. If you wanted to get a quick overview of the most recent activity on the site without spending a lot of time clicking around, just click the blue RSS button on the far-right side of the browser’s URL box. This will give you a dropdown list of all available feeds to view. If you click on “Forum - Smaller Indiana” you’ll see a nicely formated view of recent forum posts with some very nice filtering features.

As you can see in the above animated graphic, you’ll see a cleanly formated listing of recent posts. You’ll also get a very handy set of tools on the right to search and filter the feed dynamically. One of my favorite tools is the ability to reduce the amount of information displayed in the feed. For example, sliding the “Article Length” slider over to the left (as the animation demonstrates) will give you an email inbox-like view of the forum posts. This is an excellent and fast way to see what’s new on any website.

While feed readers are very effective at allowing you to subscribe and consume many different websites. This integrated feed display in Safari allows you to quickly and easily cut right to the latest content on any website or blog at supports feeds. Both Internet Explorer and FireFox also provide default views of feeds. However, neither are as robust as Safari (oddly, IE comes closest).

2 Responses

Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Stephen James

Why would someone want to view RSS feeds in a browser instead of an online or offline RSS client? If you are going to the website, you might as well read the website, no?
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Noah

Typically, yes. However, when visiting a site with multiple feeds (forum, blog posts, user activity, events, etc.) that you may not want all in your feed reader, it’s nice to be able to get a quick snapshot of recent activity.

For example, the forums on Ning sites are rather clumsy when it comes to getting a quick view of recent activity. You really have to go digging through several pages and forums. Whereas, with a single click of the RSS button, I can get a formated, chronologically sorted list of new posts from across forums and categories. That’s how I find it useful.

I’m not suggesting this is a substitute for browsing a website normally or using a feed reader. Just another way to look at data in certain situations.