RSS feeds in Firefox

I've just reconfigured Firefox for the PC to display my RSS feeds so that I don't have to open a second program to check them. I've used Sage (http://sage.mozdev.org/) which creates a set of bookmarks for each RSS feed. Firefox works with most Atom-based RSS feeds, but not those using XML. Sage corrects for this so now I can display all of my RSS feeds as a sidebar. The only drawback is that it does not list the number of unread messages, but you can open an Item List to see an abbreviated version of what is on the feed.

In related news, many publication sites (IEEE Xplore, SpringerLink and soon ScienceDirect) are now offering RSS feeds of their journals so you can quickly check what new papers are out in your areas of interest. Note that these will not work from home unless you have a username and password for the site; however, these sites check the IP address of the requestor so if you are with an institution then the access is seemless. New US patents can also be monitored through www.freepatentsonline.com, but there is nothing for Canadian, Japanese or European patents yet.

RSS feeds can can also be used to monitor to livejournal users and communities (see http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=149&q=RSS). Note that any underscore (_) must be rewritten as a dash (-) or else it won't work. An alternative form for user-specific RSS feeds is

http://www.livejournal.com/users/dracodraconis/data/rss

which works with older feed readers and accepts the dash (-) convention.