Thank you, Scott! I had NO CLUE about what RSS was, and now I do. I’m going to make use of it – baby steps *G*. I can’t wait to get on track with this – it should expand my use of the internet.

Judie

Scott, this is really awesome. I understood parts of it before, but only enough to be dangerous. Now I think I get it. Thanks so much, and thanks for being so eager to address issues we ask about!

Sorry to post at the bottom of your most recent (and elegantly helpful) column regarding how to use RSS, but one thing having nothing to do with RSS continues to baffle me:

Sometimes when I’m on a website and I click on a link, I can’t seem to figure out how to get back to the link I just left: on some occasions I just click the ‘back’ button on my mouse (or the ‘BACK’ arrow at the top of the page); other times, I have to click the red ‘CLOSE’ button at the top of the page. Obviously, if I click the red ‘CLOSE’ button when I was supposed to click ‘BACK’, it shuts down the whole mess and I have to sign back on and find my way back to the website I was on. Frustrating!

For me personally, I’d love to always be able to click my ‘back’ button on my mouse, but I’d be happy with being able to do it either way, as long as it works the same each time.

Thanks for any insight you can offer. Also, is there a better place to post unrelated questions than at the bottom of the most recent column? I hate to be a hijacker!

Another great column. I keep to them all as Macintosh refreshers.

Please keep them coming, Scott.

I am based in Australia and have sent your URL to other Mac users here. Thank you.

@M T Meee, thanks for telling others about the site, we really appreciate it.q

Thank you for this. RSS is one of the things I have not had the time to deal with. Now I get it and it should help with the 20+ sites I hit as my “Daily Read”.
Your site is a God send. I recommend it to everyone “mac” that I know.

Help! I’ve been following your directions on RSS, but have hit a wall when you say “drag the RSS icon to the RRS Bookmark folder”. When I grab it, the RRS folder is no where to be seen. I can’t figure out how to have both the bookmark folder and the RRS icon to appear on the desktop at the same time!

great article, I finally have a beginning knowledge of rss feeds.

Thank You
Don

iPhone users will find that synced (and new) rss feeds are processed for them by .mac reader. Neat.

I know we have to build on what we learn…but it is also helpful to have each of your learning modules to be a complete, stand alone article. ie: you said you can delete any RSS feed from the (the four examples you gave) if we didn’t like them, but you didn’t explain how to in your article. I made a goof and needed to delete one. I finally figured it out , but a new reader would not have that information. you left us hanging on that tip. Thank’s for ALL your helpful tips.

Apple posted a Quicktime movie tip recently on how to in set up RSS in mail.

http://www.apple.com/business/theater/#rssinmail?sr=hotnews.rss

@Bill Ruth, the general idea is that readers start at the beginning of the site and work their way to the most current post. It is something we say at the very top of the site.

I should have linked to the article though.

For other readers, if you need to manage or otherwise make changes to your RSS feeds in the bookmarks bar, simply go to your bookmark manager, and locate the item and press the delete key.

We will get to mail.app shortly, and cover in brief, RSS in email as well. Thanks for the comments

@Lee C, We are not suggesting you drag the RSS icon, let me repost the relevant portion:

A good place to start is with this site. Click on the blue RSS icon in the URL bar, and you will see the slimmed down RSS version of our site. You should also see the URL change to “feed://osxhelp.com/feed/”. To the left of the URL, right to the left of the “f” in “feed” is an icon. Not all icons on every site will be the same. Drag that icon into the RSS bookmark bar folder. You will be asked to give it a name; in this case, keeping the default of OS X Help should be fine.

So, the idea is that just as you drag any URL into a bookmark bar folder, drag the feed URL in there as well.

If that is not working for you, simply bookmark the RSS page, and when Safari asks you where you want to store that bookmark, simply select the RSS folder you made.

You may also want to review this post on the bookmark bar.

Please let me know if that is not clear.

@Matt
Readers, I had some off site emails with Matt, to narrow this down. Turns out, his mouse software programs a mouse button for going back in Safari.

This back feature was being unreliable when certain sites would take the cursor focus and put it into a search box or field.

My suggestion is to program the mouse button to use command-] as back, and tell it to do so only in Safari, which should allow the back button to work in all cases.

[...] Understanding RSS in Safari [...]

Hello,

Great post about feeds. I was just starting reading different blogs and wanted to be aware of the updates. I knew it had to do something with feeds and now i know how to use it.

Thanks. It really helped.

Theodore from Greece

What about the RSS list in the immovable “All RSS Feeds” , that comes with Safari, in the “Show All Bookmarks” window? [Firefox doesn't seem to have this ]

How do I use that?
How is it different than your idea?
Can your idea be integrated with it?

The way you tell it, I should be finding this useful. At the moment all I’m getting is a load of Apple information pouring into my inbox every day. How do I turn it off ? All I can find is information on how to add more…

@phil h, you mean you get emails in your inbox? How did they start, you must have subscribed to something? Usually there is a link at the bottom that will allow you to unsubscribe in some way.

I must have asked for it somehow – but I have one of those blue RSS icons under “Mailboxes” in Mail – news from from Apple – and another in the same sidebar, below. I don’t really want either of them.

Ahh, ok, this is simple to resolve. Open Safari, go to preferences, and click on the blue RSS tab at the top, change the default RSS reader to Safari. Close that window.

Now open Apple Mail, go to preferences, and make the same changes in there.

If they still show up in Apple Mail, hold the control key, and click on the RSS item in the left list on Apple Mail, and tell it to delete the RSS feed, this will keep them from coming in.

Brilliant, you’re a genius! Very much appreciated..

Hey Scott,
is there any way at all that I could move all of my RSS feeds from Mail.app to Google Reader, I need to create an OPML file, and I can’t find a way to do it. I am up for any way it can be done, even terminal or apple scripts.

Thanks,
Stephen

@Stephen, if you look in your home folder, in Library, and in Mail, you will find a folder called RSS. I can not remember, as I stopped using Mail for RSS, but near there, or in there, is a rss plist file, which is xml and there is a chance it is in OPML already.

At the very least, I do know you can pull your feed url’s out of this file with little effort.

thanks scott. that’s a great idea, and i’ll see what I can do with it!

Hi

Great tutorial!

Have been using both Safari and Mail as RSS readers, but have always wondered why there isn’t a line break after images in the feeds?

Hi Scott, great article. How do I force it to update my feeds rather than waiting 30 minutes? I’m using Safari 4 beta does that make a difference? Thanks.

@Adrian67 The only way I know is to go to preferences, RSS tab, click “Remove Now”, then when you load the feed, it will have refreshed it new.

Thanks for the advice Scott it’s much appreciated. Keep up the good work.

Thanks! This was great. I didn’t understand how RSS worked but now, after reading your tutorial, it’s easy as anything to set up.

Very clear article and very helpful. One thing I miss in Safari 4 is the ability to mouseover a bookmark and see just the article headings. I cannot see a way of doing this in Safari. Is it possible? I can click and go to the site’s RSS feed page but then, really, that’s no different to a normal bookmark taking you to a page.

@Walrus, I am not sure I follow your question. Bookmarks are a link to a single site/page. The bookmark defaults to the name of that page, so I am thinking, you get what you are asking already, without the need to wait for a mouseover to kick in. Can you elaborate?

Sure…Firefox has something called Live Bookmarks. When you subscribe and save bookmark,it appears normal in the folder (except it has a different icon) but if you access it from a drop down menu from the bookmarks toolbar, you can mouse over each Live Bookmark and view the feeds as headings only. This way, you can tell at a glance if new items have been added, whether you want to go to the site to read or not, or which item you want to skip and which to go to. Very versitile. I expected something similar in Safari. When I couldn’t find it, I googled and landed here. If it’s not possible by default, has someone created an add-on?

@Walrus, I am not sure I am following. In RSS within Safari, whether or not it is in the Bookmarks Bar, or a normal Bookmarks menu item…. I see the number of unread feeds as a total, as a line item next to each listing, which is the title that the page had at the time I made the Bookmark.

You can see an example of one set of mine here, which I obfuscated some items that are beta or confidential RSS feeds.

The numbers are of little use. What is useful is seeing the titles of all the new posts on a site without going to it. For example, this
is my Live Bookmarks bookmark edited for privicy.

I do not know of any way to do that in Safari. You may consider, if you use Apple Mail, adding RSS feeds in there, as they come in as what appear to be emails, which accomplishes what you want.

Safari is not very extendable in this regard, you sort of get what they give you.

You can pull it off in a very close way, which is to tell Safari to open that feed, it will show it to you, and set your prefs to not mark them as read until you click on them. This puts the display in the page, whereas you have it in a menu, but the number of clicks and the end result is about the same.

Thanks for the Apple Mail tip. That is *exactly* what I was after in Safari.

Now, if you have any influence with Apple, make the develope team give the user the option to browse to a folder or subfolder when adding a bookmark and letting user reorder bookmarks alphabetically.

Tiny changes that will help users who have hundreds of bookmarks…and adding Live Bookmarks (ala Mail)to Safari!

@Walrus, I have only very remote contacts with Apple, nothing that I could use as influence

You should use the Send Feedback option, the more people who do, the better chance you have of making it happen.

There is a small tip in this post that will show you how to sort bookmarks in Safari alphabetically. Certainly not the most convenient, but it does get the job done.

Ever since my son visited and used my computers to check his gamil account, I keep getting a popup box asking me to update the RSS feed. How do I stop this from happening? Is there something I need to delete or check? It happens several times a day when Safari is open. Help, Help

@Fran, it would appear that someone has bookmarked an RSS feed that requires a login and password. Next time it pops up, take note of what site it is asking you to update. Then go looking for that bookmark, and delete it.

Hey Scott, nice item – I came across this looking to solve an RSS with Mail problem. We run an Xserve and the RSS feeds are a great way to alert staff read the Wiki but they’re even more effective if they appear in Mail. Here’s the big BUT, this system always needs to authenticate with the user’s name and password (even when you tell Safari to remember me). This means the user has to actually click on the exclamation mark to receive new RSS feeds and this kind defeats the object of the exercise. Is there a way around this? Is there a way to manually add the feed to Mail but add user name and password in the string. I’d really appreciate anyone’s suggestions. Norm

@Norman If there is a way you can disable the authentication on the wiki, that may be the best method. Depending on how your users access the site, if they are all on relatively stable IP addresses, you use adjust Apache to use LIMIT with the IP, instead of the AUTH method you are probably using now.

That being said, you can in fact pass a user/pass in a url, but it will be exposed publicly to whoever can see it, and will show up in your apache logs.

feed://user:pass@example.com/feed.rss

Adjust accordingly.

One of the most important things in any program is how to stop it.

That is VERY true for RSS and everything about it. Something you missed. I had to call Apple Support to get Apple to stop putting many RSS things everyday in my email.

I am a new Mac user, thanks to VIsta, but not really a convert.

@LaFarr Stuart.This post did not cover how to add RSS into Apple Mail, at least, as far as I can remember.

If we get a chance to continue on this topic, Apple Mail would be one of those topics. I believe you can remote and RSS feeds from Apple Mail by control clicking on the feed icon, and deleting it. That should stop those feeds from appearing.

From there, you should set your default RSS reader to Safari, which will be in the RSS tab of the preferences to Apple Mail. That should stop new RSS items from showing up in your email application.

I do want to clear up that since we have not covered Apple Mail, we have not covered RSS in Apple Mail, and I do not believe we suggested any way to add RSS feeds to Apple Mail. Please correct me if I am wrong.

Thanks

I don’t want any Apple RSS feeds. Either in Safari or anything else. I bought the computer for what I want–NOT for what Apple or anybody else wants to shove in front of me.

RSS sucks. If you or somebody else wants it fine; but I should be able to block it, in my compute. Ultimately, there is a way: Never turn the iMac on.

Greetings! I just found your posts – SO helpful – thank you! Except this one on RSS feeds. I now know what they are, thank you, thank you. But I tried – and tried – to follow your directions to create an RSS folder and put feeds in it. After a frustrating half hour I gave up. Could you try to help me via email? Thank you – Karen

@Karen, can you give some specifics as to where in the process you got stuck. What was working, what did not work. There are more or less a set of steps, at what point did those steps not work?

Thanks, Scott. Yesterday I completed some updates that had been waiting (I’ve been gone 4 months), and this morning I tried following your steps again. Worked perfectly. Thanks again so much for the individual attention – you’re meeting a key need that in my opinion, Apple should be doing a far better job of meeting than they do. Karen

Hello Scott,

Thanks for the info, I work in Dubai (I do not speak arabic) however anytime I tried to check the RSS for news everything comes up in Arabic language, back in Mexico everything appeared in spanish, how can I change the language of the RSS to show me the info in english or spanish?

@Joyge
Are you using the same computer and seeing these changes, or are these different computers? We do not publish the RSS feed in anything but English, as that is all I am fluent in.

I can only guess that your RSS feeds are being shown to you in other language fonts. Or are the words literally translated to another language? Then again, Spanish uses an English letterset, so I am not sure how this is happening.

Can you show me a screen shot of the RSS feed in another language? I am guessing you are not using Safari for RSS, but perhaps Google, which does to translation for you. You should be able to look at the feed url Google is using, and change it somewhat to alter the language.