Safari RSS, released with Mac OS X 10.4, is a fantastic upgrade to the Safari browser. Not only is it much faster than it’s predecessors, it also has the ability to view RSS feeds with a single-click.

Once you’re viewing an Safari RSS feed you can easily sort it by many different options, and even search the RSS feed. The search has been something that I’ve been utilizing because it takes advantage of Spotlight within Safari RSS to search not only 1 but multiple RSS feeds. The speed at which it does this is phenomenal, mostly due to the fact that you are search local files.

Recently though, there has been some Safari RSS goodies being mentioned, and I thought I’d catalog them here.

Safari RSS, released with Mac OS X 10.4, is a fantastic upgrade to the Safari browser. Not only is it much faster than it’s predecessors, it also has the ability to view RSS feeds with a single-click.

Once you’re viewing an Safari RSS feed you can easily sort it by many different options, and even search the RSS feed. The search has been something that I’ve been utilizing because it takes advantage of Spotlight within Safari RSS to search not only 1 but multiple RSS feeds. The speed at which it does this is phenomenal, mostly due to the fact that you are search local files.

Recently though, there has been some Safari RSS goodies being mentioned, and I thought I’d catalog them here.

Mass Feed Import via OPML

No doubt this process will become much more refined in the future, but Jon Hicks lays out the process to take feeds from your favorite feed reader and import them into Safari.

If however, you’d rather only bring a few of your feeds from your news reader of choice into Safari RSS you can simply drag the feed into Safari and it will open immediately, and then you can bookmark it. I only recommend doing this if you are only pulling over a very small amount of feeds.

Change RSS update frequency

Safari RSS automatically pulls down the latest data from your feeds at set intervals. This makes it easy to see when you have unread or unseen information inside of your feeds. However, if you think you would like to change the interval that Safari updates, you can do so by using these instructions.

It is recommended that you not change this number to something incredibly low. This will end up causing flood attacks on the hosts of the feeds, and it might even result your IP being banned from further updates. Typically checking every 5 minutes or so is good form.

Quick Gmail notifier

Safari RSS can also be used as a Gmail notifier. What’s nice about this tip is that you do not have to run another app to be notified of new E-mail. Which saves screen real estate and resources.

Combine RSS feeds

If you have a folder full of RSS feeds, here is a quick keyboard shortcut to open them all without having to open the folder. Hold CMD while clicking on the folder to open all the RSS feeds in a single tab. This also works if you have multiple Web URLs in one folder, except it will open each of the URLs in a separate tab.

Customize Safari RSS layouts

Safari uses CSS and layout templates to display the RSS feeds. These are customizable with a little hacking.

Vulnerability in Widget install

Some have made reference to the fact that auto-install of Dashboard Widgets via Safari can become a vulnerability. Although this isn’t necessarily something to lose sleep over, there is an immediate precautionary fix for this by using Saft.