Xatal

For a while, I searched high and low to find a good FireFox extension for handling RSS. What I ideally wanted was something that could queue up unread items and inform me via the status bar and a notification pop-up. I have an extension for my Gmail account that does this, and a matching one for RSS would have been perfect.

Everything I found seemed to have a little bit more or less than what I wanted — I just couldn’t find something that seemed to work right.

A sample Google Reader interface

So after searching thoroughly, I realized that the best solution came from the same company that seems to do most everything right — yes, I’m talking about Google.

Google Reader can combine all of your RSS subscriptions in a nice, easy-to-read interface, and the FireFox extension Google Reader Watcher can display your unread items in the  status bar, popping up notifications upon new posts. The addon is pretty simple but very customizable, giving you a good amount of control over how your feeds are handled.

Google Reader Watcher and Gmail Notifier side by side in the status bar

Finally, all my woes are solved! I can now keep much better track of what I have (or haven’t) read, and now I can be updated when new posts are made.

Before I was occasionally missing out on posts by blogs I like to read, and I was getting pretty frustrated finding ones that I’d missed.

This may be helpful to a few of you who might be looking for a good way to integrate RSS into your browser. If you use any other method, please tell me!