How to follow blogs through a feed reader extension

Do you ever get sick of the DW Reading page? It's limited by pagination, you can't switch between title-only and full views, and in order to subscribe to offsite feeds for blogs such as Blogger or Tumblr you have to create feed accounts, which are essentially public offsite feed aggregators that don't require consent from the bloggers.(1)

With a feed reader and some initial setup you can get a seamless and customizable page of your subscriptions, navigable with shortcut keys, with alerts if you want them, in detailed or abbreviated view, and subscribe across sites without the moral rights and copyright pitfalls associated with creating an unauthorized public copy of other people's content. And yes, you still get access to your locked posts.

There are a lot of options when it comes to feed readers, from dedicated apps to online accounts, and everyone's needs are different. If you want a single page from which to follow social media accounts that don't support RSS/Atom feeds as well as blogs that do, something like FlowReader may be of interest to you.

In this post I will discuss setting up a browser extension, Brief for Firefox, which follows actual feeds and not all types of social media accounts. It doesn't have mobile synchronization, which I don't need because I don't like reading blogs from mobile. If you want more features than this extension offers I encourage you to look up the other options out there. If you're not sure where to start with feed readers, maybe this setup will be a way for you to get a better feel for their ins and outs and of your own needs.

( Setting up, using, and customizing Brief )