Over the last few months I’ve been looking into other ways to keep up on my ever-growing RSS feed list instead of the Google homepage I have come to love so much. One option I have been trying to become happy with is Sage, a Firefox extension. Like most Firefox extensions, this one installs in seconds and requires a restart, pretty much painless.

Once installed, you can access the toolbar, which loads into the left side of your browser the way your bookmarks would, three different ways.

  • ALT + Z is the keyboard shortcut
  • Tools > Sage is the menu way
  • Customize your navigation toolbar to add the Sage icon to it (right click anywhere in yoru navigation toolbar and choose customize)

The Sage extension acts in many ways like a bookmark sidebar does, loading in your browser from a stored set of RSS feeds, rather then on a webpage like the Google homepage. You will have the option to create folders for different feeds; defiantly a plus and you can drag and drop feeds to it. Simply grab the RSS icon from any web page and drag it over, it will grab the data for it.

Viewing the feeds with Sage is a pleasure, the colors are neutral and they appear to be downloaded and load locally, so I am presuming you could view them offline if you needed to. Not all feeds are full content, some are only partial; so don’t always expect to read something entirely with Sage.

I have two main problems with the extension, which is preventing it from becoming my permanent RSS reader though

  • Not dynamic. I have to install it on my work computer, home computers and laptop, none of it syncs. While there is an export / import option, I don’t want to have to do that on a daily basis.
  • No feed previews. Outside of the title, I get no other information about the article unless I click the title at which point it will load into the main portion of your browser.

As I mentioned before, the Google Homepage now has a + next to the feed which will show the first paragraph of the article, some cases the entire article depending how the author has set up their feeds.

The concept is there, however without it being dynamic, I can’t see myself using it on a daily basis.

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