I recently switched to NetVibes from iGoogle. I had been an iGoogle user for a long time now, a few years, but it was beginning to look too clunky and unhelpful. An update is due (And developers already have access to it) but it still seems pretty lacking and the only major addition seems to be a sidebar on the left. I had known about Netvibes but never really meant to switch. I recently tried it, loved it, and have been using it ever since. One thing that I noticed right away was that I wasn’t able to add feeds to my Netvibes page through FireFox as I was with iGoogle. For feed reading I use Google Reader, but I do like to add a few feeds to my home pages for simple things. For example I’m subscribed to Urban Dictionary’s Urban Word of the Day. I obviously limit this to just one item.
Anyways, instead of having to copy the URL, going to Netvibes, and going through the whole process of adding a feed, I figured out a way to add it as an option to FireFox 3. You will want to head on over to about:config and in the Filter box type browser.contentHandlers.types , this isn’t necessary but it helps with focusing on what we’re going to do. You should see options like browser.contentHandlers.types followed by a number. Yours should go up to 5 (Meaning 5 is the highest number used by any of the options), but either way, when you add the following options, choose a number above the highest number you see. Next you will want to right click anywhere on the window and click New > String. Add these three:
Format is: Preference Name = Value
browser.contentHandlers.types.#.title = Netvibes
browser.contentHandlers.types.#.type = application/vnd.mozilla.maybe.feed
browser.contentHandlers.types.#.uri = http://www.netvibes.com/subscribe.php?url=%s
Obviously make sure to replace the # sign with the number which I explained in the previous paragraph. Note that the last option ends in uri not url. So in my case, this is what the end result looks like:
Now you can go to RSS feeds and add them using NetVibes!
