In Firefox you can set Google Reader as your default feed reader. Now when you click on a feed link (or when you click “subscribe” after you preview the feed), you are taken to a page where you’re asked whether you want to add the feed to your Google homepage or to Reader.

If you don’t use your homepage for reading feeds this can quickly become an annoyance. Here’s how to bypass this page & go directly to Reader:

Open up about:config & filter for browser.contentHandlers.

Change the value of browser.contentHandlers.types.2.uri to http://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/%s

Then reset the value of browser.contentHandlers.auto.application/vnd.mozilla.maybe.feed

Restart Firefox. Again select Google Reader as the default feed reader in Firefox’s options so that the value of the previous preference also becomes http://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/%s

UPDATE (16/02/2007): Using a clever bit of hackery I’ve made the links point to the players’ profiles on Cricinfo which I find far richer in information than the ICC website’s ratings graph.

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I love cricket & follow it closely. I recently stumbled on this official ICC cricket rankings page. My first instinct was to look for the little orange icon (maybe Firefox had failed to sniff it out). NO RSS FEEDS. That’s something that really peeves me. Rather than persuade the webmaster I went ahead and made one using a terrific online service called Feed43.

Feed43 is an web scraper that produces rss feeds from web pages. You look at the page source & define a search pattern and Feed43 will pull up the first 20 items that match. So the feed would only list the top 20 players. Also the feed is refreshed only every 6 hours (there are paid plans with more options). The limitations notwithstanding, it fits the bill.

Here are 2 feeds (best for use as live bookmarks) I whipped up:

• ODI batting rankings
• ODI bowling rankings

Wait there’s more!! Add this to you userChrome.css to make players from your country show up in red.

@namespace url(http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul);
.bookmark-item[livemark="true"] menuitem[label*="country code like WI"] > label {
font-weight: bold !important;
color: red !important;
}


Here’s how it looks: