Add news feeds to NewsGator from Firefox the easy way

When I am working on my Mac it is easy to add new news feeds to NewsGator since I have NewNewsWire installed, but when I am not working on my Mac, for instance when I am at my work doing some research I would still be able to add news feeds I come across to my NewsGator account.

I know that NewsGator provides toolbars for both Internet Explorer and Firefox, but I do not like to install additional pieces of software just to add a news feed. Also when I am working at clients using their hardware mist of the time you will not be able to install software anyway.

Firefox itself has support for adding news feed to some online services (Bloglines, My Yahoo and Google) as well as Firefox’s own bookmarking system (local to the browser itself).

Although Firefox by default has only three services defined, there is room for a total of six services (0 through 5). The settings for these services can be found within the ‘about:config’-page of Firefox. Staring from version 3 of Firefox when you try to open the ‘about:config’-page, Firefox warns you about the damage you could do to Firefox by changing settings using this page. So you have to confirm that you will play nice with Firefox by clicking on the button “I’ll be careful, I promise!”.

On the ‘about:config’-page type the string ‘browser.contentHandlers’ into the Filter-field, this will make sure only the relevant settings are displayed.

The settings for a unused entry (most likely this will be the one numbered 3) are

Preference Name	Status	Type	Value
browser.contentHandlers.types.3.title	default	string	chrome://browser-region/locale/region.properties
browser.contentHandlers.types.3.type	default	string	application/vnd.mozilla.maybe.feed
browser.contentHandlers.types.3.uri	default	string	chrome://browser-region/locale/region.properties

To add NewsGator as a content handler for news feeds we will change the settings for the first available unused entry

Preference Name	Status	Type	Value
browser.contentHandlers.types.3.title	user set	string	NewsGator
browser.contentHandlers.types.3.type	default	string	application/vnd.mozilla.maybe.feed
browser.contentHandlers.types.3.uri	user set	string	http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/subscriber/subext.aspx?url=%s

Now it is time to restart Firefox to let these changes take effect.

From now on every time you click on a RSS feed, Firefox will give you the possibility to add the news feed to your NewsGator account.