Over the past three years I’ve tried a bunch of different feed aggregators and could never stick with a per-blog / folder-based reader. I have found I really prefer a river-of-news style reader (a la Dave Winer). But I also find I like having my feeds in Outlook where they are indexed and searchable, available for offline reading, synched between my computers, and available via Outlook Web Access as needed. After many trials I am finding that I love using FeedBlitz to subscribe to feeds by email.  Each day I get a river-of-news view from the feeds I subscribe to.  I put the daily emails into a folder that I can then search.

Here’s how you can subscribe to a feed via FeedBlitz using this URL form:

http://www.feedblitz.com/f/f.fbz?NewFeed&url=%feed%

I use the Google toolbar in Firefox (on Windows), which has a handy Subscribe button. Here’s how you can easily hack it to use FeedBlitz as your default reader:

  1. Close all instances of Firefox.
  2. Go to C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles
  3. Go into the profile folder (e.g., puajejnq.default)
  4. Edit prefs.js
  5. Add the following lines:

    6. user_pref(”google.toolbar.subscribe.aggregators.feedblitz.desc”, “FeedBlitz Email Subscription”);
    user_pref(”google.toolbar.subscribe.aggregators.feedblitz.id”, “feedblitz”);
    user_pref(”google.toolbar.subscribe.aggregators.feedblitz.order”, “6″);
    user_pref(”google.toolbar.subscribe.aggregators.feedblitz.title”, “FeedBlitz”);
    user_pref(”google.toolbar.subscribe.aggregators.feedblitz.url”, “http://www.feedblitz.com/f/f.fbz?NewFeed&url=%feed%”);

  6. Save and close prefs.js
  7. Launch Firefox
  8. In the Google toolbar, click the Google logo to get a menu and select Options.
  9. Click the Subscribe Settings button.
  10. Select FeedBlitz and click OK.
  11. Click OK again.
  12. Go to a page with an RSS feed and click the Subscribe button. It should launch the FeedBlitz subscription page in a new window.

Enjoy!