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.

Hi scott, yes I am using the same computer I used back in Mexico, also I am using safari. I sent a screen shot of the RSS feed to your e-mail. When I click on single news provider it is ok (in english) but when I want to see all RSS articles then it comes in Arabic. I would appreciate if you could check your e-mail for the two screen shots I have attahced.
Thank you

@Jorge
You are using a google reader url for your feeds. Nothing wrong with that, but you have it set to display feeds in a language that is local to your location. You need to look into the preferences for google rss reader, and see if you can change that to english.

Sometimes, you can look at the url, and you will see something like &lang=en or &lang=sp and just change them to what are logical for you.

I think this post is relevant to how you will change your google reader preferences to English, or any other language for that matter.

AWSOME!!! THANK YOU SO MUCH!! You are gonna save me so much time! what a nice present nowadays!!

Do you know of a way to turn off feed reading in Safari? I can do so in IE, but can’t determine whether this is possible in Safari. If I have RSS and XHTML in the same document and want it display as a web page, Safari thinks it’s a feed and treats it as such. Any ideas or help would be appreciated.

@Maura,
There is no way to completely turn off feeds in Safari, though you have plenty of options. One would be to use a dedicated feed reader, like NetNewsWire which is pretty great software, and then in Safari Preferences, you would change the RSS tab to set that NetNewsWire ( Or whatever desktop RSS reader you have chosen ) as your default reader.

Do you perhaps have a sample url you can share?

What is probably happening is Safari, and I would imagine FireFox, and Google Chrome are all doing the the same/similar, though correct thing.

Google may do things a little different as they have a stake in RSS with their own RSS tools and readers. This is not to say they are bad in any way, quite the contrary, I find nearly all RSS readers have their merits.

The browser sees RSS formatted data, either RSS, XML, whatever, and the browser tries to do it’s best guess to display it. Browsers do a lot of guessing, web developers do not always make sites perfectly to standards. The web is sort of a messy bunch of text underneath all the pretty.

If Safari is truly showing a website as an RSS feed, then you are only a few things that could be happening, which would be consistent across all browsers.

First, would be that the data is in fact RSS data, so the app is doing the correct thing.

Second, is that the http headers are sending an http redirect, or actually changing the meta header from text/html to that of an RSS feed.

I suspect you are getting a redirect. If you look at the url, I would almost bet that it is no longer http://example.com but instead, has been changed to feed://example.com

What you could try, is changing the protocol from feed:// to http://

However, the browser may just redirect you back to the feed again. This more than likely is not a browser issues, if I understand you correctly. This is a bug with the website itself.

Can you provide a sample URL? I am assuming this does not happen to all sites, but only one, or a small handful?

I hope this is helpful; with a sample url, we should be able to run some test and figure out just what is going on.

/*My gut tells me new users have no idea what RSS is*/

What does your gut tell you as a reason why other browsers can read RSS feeds – just like that and – “the all mighty Apple Safari Browser” would open every single RSS feed in …. WHAT? Photoshop???

Give me a break!

@Pete,
My gut would tell me that there is a misconfiguration in the protocol handler that tells the browser which scheme should be mapped to which application.

feed:// should map to whatever the OS thinks is set for your default RSS reader. If photoshop took over that setting, which is all very possible, then you need to change that value in one of your browsers preferences.

Scott, cheers

I know that but this was not intended to be my point (to find out what to do)

My point here simply is, I use Opera, Google Chrome, Mozilla, Yep – even the ugly IE7 and “ALL” of them can read XML RSS Feeds – but come to Safari – Safari thinks it should be read by Photoshop!

Not only is this an arrogant move by Safari (Mac) – but worse, it’s just so stupid that one would really ask … has Apple already or is it well on track – to loose it?!

There are too many of these little stupid actions my iMac takes, making me really wonder if I made the right choice moving away from Windows and into the (sour) Apple … Cheers

Hi @Pete, cheers to you as well

I think you may be looking at this wrong. The first thing to understand, is that Safari using PhotoShop as the RSS reader is is absolutely not the fault of Apple, your iMac, Safari, or anything at all related to Apple. At least, I don’t believe that to be the case.

Do a quick google search for “Adobe installer”, “Adobe installer sucks”, “Adobe installer broken” etc and you will quickly learn, by Adobes own blog posts and admission, that Adobe has an admittedly poor installer/uninstaller/upgrader. This is supposed to be resolved in the CS6 release I believe, where we finally get a package based installer, and not the custom built installer Adobe uses now.

More than likely, Adobe’s installer is what changed this preference, perhaps related to why Adobe’s installers ask you to quit all running browsers before you are allowed to install their applications. If everything is not just right, all sorts of things break, I see it all the time.

If you uninstall Adobe’s stuff, (good luck with that, as their uninstaller will not remove anywhere near everything), then Safari would probably go back to working fine. Had PhotoShop never been installed, this issue more than likely would never have happened.

If you are under the impression this was in any way an intentional decision, to use PhotoShop as an RSS reader, that is incorrect. Something is not correct about how your system is, how PhotoShop was installed, or some other anomaly, which is causing this. This is not normal at all. PhotoShop does not have the protocol handlers to read RSS, so no one would ever try to set it as an RSS reader.

One could argue that the OS should not allow a RSS reader to be chosen that can’t in fact read RSS data formats, but that is a hard question to answer by just selecting an application in a menu. It is also not the responsibility of the OS to police bad developer decisions. Developers actually desire this freedom to make unusual choices if they desire.

I can assure you, a clean installation of Mac OS X will work out of the box with Safari as the default RSS reader. From your list of applications, I can tell that your machine has significant amounts of software installed. At the least, you have PhotoShop, and unless you performed a custom install and then manual cleanup after that install, Adobe has put a good amount of junk on your system.

You mention IE which tells me you are using a VM of some form, either Parallels or VirtualBox perhaps. Both of those install system level drivers to make the bridge between the OS for networking, mass storage devices, simple data transports like USB, SATA, and Firewire. And then there are the “Additional Tools” most VM’s install. Or perhaps you are dual booting into BootCamp, which also means that significant driver and kernel level software has been installed.

Without keeping a close eye on all these applications, problems can and will happen. Nothing prevents developers from writing bad software, software that causes the core software of your computer to misbehave. If you look at it from the point of view of a new installation of Mac OS X with no 3rd party apps installed, I think you will find that the platform is rather stable and usable in that state.

It is more and more common for users to be running beta software. As a result, people have come to forget that beta software can cause problems. Chrome is very much beta software, especially the Mac version, not so much the Windows version, and explicitly states that using it may cause problems from small glitches to complete data loss. It’s more than fine to run such software, but people do need to remember, just because it is from a major software player, and just because it appears to work, does not mean it will not cause adverse behavior.

What other little actions are you having problems with, I am sure we can solve those as well, or perhaps find a common theme amongst them that is related. The RSS issue with PhotoShop and Safari is a 5 second fix, I would just change the preference and things will be fine. If it somehow reverts back to PhotoShop, then you need to find out which other software you have installed that is causing this.

RSS feeds right in the browser. That’s the primary reason I prefer Safari over other browsers. I tried Firefox, which I like and keep as my secondary browser, but it doesn’t make it for me. My browsing experience has become so tied with RSS that I can’t use another browser no matter how fast it is. For me it all comes to one point: convenience. I like to keep in touch with latest news without having to look for them. Then I can choose to read an article of interest by reading the headline and the summary. The only drawback is that sometimes RSS bookmarked pages take forever to load or don’t load at all leaving me with a timeout error message. Great article.

@Juan,
Thanks for the comments, we truly appreciate it.

May I suggest for your slow RSS issues that you set your prefs to expire old RSS articles after a week, two weeks if you have to, longer if need be. Safari having to store and track the state of multiple RSS feeds can slow it down over time.

This is the same way that storing your browsing history can slow things down beyond a certain number of entries. Clearing your history can often make Safari go from turtle to race rabbit.

All RSS and history items are stored in a “plist” file, which is a single file, with multiple entries in a special format called XML. The XML is further optimized by converting to a binary format, for speed in parsing the file.

Regardless of the optimizations, a file is still a file, it still must be read, and if it is large, reading it will take time. The larger it is, the more there is to read off disk, and also translate from computer readable formatting to human readable formatting. After read into memory, there is still the CPU overhead of parsing all that data.

Keeping your RSS and History lists as short as possible but still giving you the access you need is the goal. Someone who is as heavy an RSS reader as yourself may want to look into a dedicated RSS reader. These offer local caching of each article. Generally speaking, number of RSS items is no longer an issue, items they are stored in a database, not a file, like the former mentioned method.

NetNewsWire is the go to RSS reader on the Mac, but I also find the simple Apple Mail, which in your prefs for Safari can be instructed to become your new default RSS reader. Before this was a feature, I wrote a script that parsed my RSS feed and delivered each entry asa single email. I was essentially mimicking what Apple has now provided. I the new workflow.

With RSS items now each becoming an email message, I can keep RSS items as long as I like. Email clients are designed to save messages forever, and in large quantities. The bold messages are ones I have not read, the plain ones have been read. But you get other added bonuses that RSS alone does not offer. Bonuses such as sort by date, sort by subject, maintain a complete RSS archive only limited by the size of your available storage space.

RSS in email is really nice, as it is now much more database backed, meaning better storage and caching routines to aid performance. Each RSS entry looks like, and is an email; you read them as such. This means, you could have 10,000+ RSS items to little or no speed degradation. The entries are now no more than emails in a folder, though the contents of the email happen to be RSS data. I have my first email ever, dating back to the year 1997. I save almost all my emails, minus spam, order confirmations, and other misc junk I will not need long term. I am probably nearing a million messages. Apple Mail messages, and all the 10′s of thousands of RSS items I have collected, don’t appear to cause any detectable performance degradation.

There are also a number of RSS reader improvements making their way to the new Safari 5 extensions scene. These extensions are going to be amazing, and the ones out already are impressive. Extensions will add little bits of functionality to Safari.

So far, every “FireFox can do this, but Safari can’t” has probably been met with an equivalent new extension. Extensions have only been publicly available for less than a week now, and the count of available ones is well over 100.

Greasemonkey, FireFox extensions, plus Chrome extensions are apparently all easily converted. The documentation makes mentions to it, however, the docs are noted as a work in progress, or a technology preview, meaning the specifics are not yet written or explained. Someone who is versed in extension/plug-in writing will solve that here shortly though.

And don’t forget, once you are out of RSS and reading the article, there is the new Safari ‘Reader’ view, which makes any web page look more like a page out of a book. No ads, clean type, visually appealing, much easier to read, no distractions. This is probably to the detriment of our advertising, but this site is about the users, not the ads

Thanks for taking the time to make a comment, we appreciate your involvement.

I’m not sure why I began receiving photos from Pixdaux on the RSS feed. This is really Greek to me! I’m a great-grandmother and I never expect to understand all this computer will do! I want to stop the inundation of material I receive from Pixdaux. Please tell me how to do it–in simple languge. Thanks.

@Yvonne, where exactly are you seeing the images from Pixdaux, or more specifically, what steps do you take to get to the page in which you see the images?

I am guessing that you are selecting “View All RSS Feeds” from within a bookmark menu. If you want this one list of items to go away, open your bookmark manager and delete the bookmark for pixdaus.com.

Hopefully some of these articles on Bookmark management will help you to delete the item.

I’m using Safari 5.0.2, and RSS does not appear in the Safari Preferences window. I’d like to set NewsFire to be my default RSS reader but can’t do it. I’ve looked at Safari Preferences in the Apple Store and RSS is there as it should be. Do you have any idea why RSS doesn’t display in my Safari Preferences?

Thanks,
Les

@Les, are you stating that if you open Safari, then go to the Preferences, there is no RSS tab at the top of the preferences window?

Can you perhaps make a screen shot of your preferences window and upload it to http://imgur.com and paste that url back here?

You could also dump out your safari preferences and paste those into http://pastie.org/ and then share that url back here also.

You can get the text based preferences for Safari by pasting the below command into the Terminal.app in your Utilities folder of your Applications folder…

defaults read com.apple.safari

Copy and paste the data returned from that command to pastie.org. You may want to look at the data before you publicly post it, and redact or otherwise obfuscate parts of the data if you feel it is private. There really should not be anything of much importance from a privacy perspective.

Scott,

I deleted com.apple.Safari.plist, re-launched Safari and, magically, the RSS icon appeared. I was then able to enable NewsFire and everything is now working. Apparently, something in my Safari.plist was corrupted and that was preventing the RSS icon from appearing in Safari preferences. Thanks for your quick reply and offer to help resovle my problem. I appreciate your willingness to help.

Cheers,
Les

Great article. I have not been able to make sense out of RSS, what it was, what it did or how to use the tool. Thanks for the information.

RC

Scott, thanks for the great article and the time that you spend answering questions.

I use the browser Camino which does not support RSS. Since I don’t want to abandon Camino, I thought that I was condemned to running yet another application in order to receive the one or two RSS feeds that I want until I read your comment posted on 6/14/10 about getting them as e-mails. This is exactly what I’m looking for. Would you please send me (or post) the script that you wrote? I currently use GMail to receive e-mails and will probably use NetNewsWire to initially receive RSS feeds (unless you have a better reader suggestion). Do you have any suggestions about automating the NetNewsWire portion of this process?

Man, I appreciate it.
-Bruce-