Make a list of the steps you have to take from the formation of this thought: "I want to subscribe to this," to actually complete the subscription. It's depressingly long. We should do something to make it shorter. (And Google has, read on.)

This may be the single greatest thing about Twitter. It took that long sequence and shortened it to one step: Click. Unless we can teach a website to read your mind, it can't get any shorter.

When I switched to Chrome after years of being a Firefox user, one thing I missed right off was the white-on-orange feed icon in the address area of the browser window, indicating that the site you're looking at has a feed you can subscribe to. This disappearance made the arduous process even more difficult. Thanks! (Sarcasm.)

Then at one point in an act of desperation I guessed that there was probably a plug-in that fixed this. I don't like to install browser plug-ins for some reason, but when I found this one, I installed it right away. And the white-on-orange icon comes back. Yay! Then I discovered later it's even better. I can configure it with a URL that it will jump to when I click the icon, and it will provide the URL of the feed as a parameter to the page. Luckily, River2 has a page that can accept a quick subscription to a feed, in just that form. So I set it up, and ever since I have been happier with RSS subscription than I have ever been. A remarkable number of steps are cut off the list of steps that follows "I want to subscribe to this."

It's called The RSS Subscription Extension, and it's by Google, and it's a must-get for people who subscribe to feeds from their browser.

Thanks! (No sarcasm.)

 6/23/2012; 3:41:47 AM.