How add feeds to The Old Reader in firefox?
March 15, 2013 11:03 AM

I'm supposed to use "http://theoldreader.com/feeds/subscribe?url=%s" in the firefox feed handler, but I'm unclear exactly HOW. I know that replacing the "%s" with the url I'm wanting to add works, but I don't know how to get firefox to replace the '%s' with the current url. Adding it as a bookmark doesn't appear to work. Thoughts?
posted by leotrotsky to Computers & Internet (7 answers total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
So, you're looking at Salon and you follow their link to their rss feed. It is:

salon.com.feedsportal.com/c/35105/f/648624/index.rss

You paste your subscription string ahead of that in the address window:

http://theoldreader.com/feeds/subscribe?url=salon.com.feedsportal.com/c/35105/f/648624/index.rss and hit enter.

Boom.
posted by Lyn Never at 11:18 AM on March 15, 2013


(I'm sure someone will create a Firefox extension to do this, any minute now.)
posted by Lyn Never at 11:20 AM on March 15, 2013


You need to make changes in your about:config Firefox settings. Check out this tutorial.
posted by stopgap at 11:37 AM on March 15, 2013


stopgap, that's very helpful, but I'm concerned doing that will result in me automatically subscribing to every RSS feed I visit.
posted by leotrotsky at 11:49 AM on March 15, 2013


I'm not on a desktop at the moment, but I believe when you click on a site's feed, Firefox shows you all of the feed handlers that you have configured and lets you choose which one to send it to. That's why you have to include a number in the configuration strings: so you can set up several feed handlers for different purposes. For example, on my copy of Firefox, clicking on a feed will give me a message that it has loaded a feed and ask me if I want to send it to Google Reader, a live bookmark, or display the XML directly in the browser.

(I should also note that the article I linked is apparently ancient — from Firefox 2.0. There's a chance that the way to add a feed handler has changed, though I don't think it has.)
posted by stopgap at 12:04 PM on March 15, 2013


I can confirm that the tutorial stopgap linked works properly in Firefox 19.0.2 (latest for a Mac), and results in me being able to choose to subscribe via The Old Reader when I load a feed (but does not automatically subscribe me to every feed I load; I am leaving the checkbox that says "Always use The Old Reader to subscribe to feeds" unchecked).
posted by Pandora Kouti at 2:40 PM on March 15, 2013


Well, until somebody writes a script, it'll serve as a wait for it stopgap measure.
posted by leotrotsky at 8:11 PM on March 15, 2013


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