All Hail Free Republic's new URL Icon!

Free Republic | latest comments ^ | today | me

[avg_freeper]

I just noticed today that Free Republic has a new URL icon. You know, those little icons that appear next to a web site's address. It's a darn nifty white star on a red and blue back ground.

[avg_freeper]

Keep up the good work. Keep Free Republic Beautiful!

[aft_lizard]

wow I never noticed that until now.

[jtminton]

I had to delete my old shortcut and create a new one to get it. Yeah, it looks pretty sweet. Nice and Texas-ey.

[Boundless]

> ... those little icons that appear next to
> a web site's address.

It's called a favicon (filename: favicon.ico)

I was wondering why FR didn't have one, as it's probably
as much server load to fail the browser requests for it
than to simply serve up the bits.

Any number of sites describe how to create one.

[Terpfen]

In addition, FR seems to have added an RSS feed. Firefox 1.0PR's RSS detector pops up when I load the breaking news section. I've got breaking news and general news hotwired.

I wonder how long this RSS feed has been around, though. Maybe it was added concurrently with the release of FF 1.0PR, but I doubt that. I've never noticed that orange XML/RSS button that commonly denotes the availability of an RSS feed. Could anyone clue me in?

[Terpfen]

Another thing... my preferences seem to have been overidden, and I'm only seeing 50 comments per page, instead of the 100 I have set. Flushed my cache and cleared the cookies--no deal. Anyone know what's up?

[evilC]

The RSS feeds have been around, as an experimental feature, for a while now. They were not widely "advertised". I think there was a thread about it.

To get the rss feed just add .rss to the FreeRepublic URL that you want.
e.g. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/browse becomes http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/browse.rss. This should work for most topics.

I think the new Firefox added a way of automagically detecting feeds. Which is why you are only seeing them now.

I think the preferences thing is due to server load. When the server is feeling the strain replies are cut back to 50 for all users.

[evilC]

BTW did you upgrade from an earlier Firefox? If so, how did it go. Do your extensions work? Were other settings kept? etc.

[Terpfen]

"I think the new Firefox added a way of automagically detecting feeds. Which is why you are only seeing them now."

It does. When a page has an RSS feed, a small orange RSS button appears in the lower-right area of the status bar. You click it and you can add it to your bookmarks. It's called "Live Bookmarks" in Firefox 1.0PR. But now that I know how to use FRSS (I can call it that, right?), I guess I'll plug it in to Sage, which is still a great RSS reader, due to its preview function.

As for your other post, yeah, I upgraded from 0.9.3. Standard procedure: uninstall Firefox, but leave the directory and profiles intact, then install the new version. A couple of extensions didn't work, but 1.0PR will tell you on startup which extensions/themes aren't working, and will disable them. Most of the major extensions have already been updated to work with 1.0PR. I'm just waiting on a version of the Le Breeze theme that's compatible with 1.0PR. It's a stable build, so I recommend that you grab it, if for no other reason than to help Mozilla's marketing. They're trying to get 1 million downloads in 10 days. The last I checked, a couple of days ago, they had 160,000 downloads in 2 days.

[hoosierboy]

I just noticed mine today! Thanks to whoever is responsible.

[John Valentine]

Strange. The FR favicon shows up effortlessly on my wife's computer, but I can't get it to appear on mine to save my life.

Same OS, same browser. Different result.