Tool Time Friday | RSS Ticker

RSS Ticker loads your Live Bookmarks and scrolls their entries across your screen while you surf. It’s perfect for staying informed without having to actively browse entries in an RSS reader.

The ticker can be placed at the bottom of the screen (below the status bar) or at the top of the screen (underneath your bookmarks toolbar). Nearly all aspects of the ticker’s display are customizable, including the scroll speed, smoothness, and link width. You can even set a limit for the number of items that appear from each feed.

You can decide which of your Live Bookmarks you want scrolled in the ticker by checking or unchecking the box in the bookmark’s properties dialog (right-click on the Live Bookmark in the Bookmarks menu and choose Properties), or by managing all of your feeds in the ticker’s feed manager (in the RSS Ticker options dialog).

You can choose to have RSS Ticker shuffle all of the entries from all of the feeds so that you always have a variety of links showing in the ticker, and since RSS Ticker shows the feed’s favicon (favorite’s icon) next to each entry, you’ll know exactly which feed each entry is from.

The ticker and the items in the ticker have a context menu, which allows you to open each item in the current tab, a new tab, or a new window, mark an item as read without opening it, mark an entire feed as read, or mark all feeds as read. You can also open items in tabs in a variety of ways. There is also an option to manually refresh your feeds. The context menu is customizable, so you can choose to hide the options you don’t want to see. (Note: Since version 1.7, you can mark an item as read by Ctrl-clicking on it.)

You can move the ticker back and forth manually using the scrollwheel on your mouse, so if you just missed something interesting, you can easily reverse the ticker and get to the link you want.

By choosing to customize your Firefox toolbar, you can add the RSS Ticker toolbar button. This button can be used to quickly enable or disable the ticker without visiting the options dialog.

RSS Ticker reads RSS (2.0, 1.0, 0.9x) and Atom feeds, and the ticker can be disabled and hidden when you’re not using it, unlike many other ticker extensions. You can also have it hide itself when it’s empty, perfect for saving valuable screen space.