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I like Rojo, a very efficient web based feed reader. The Rojo guys have added many nice improvements to their user interface after the company was bought by SixApart, of Movable Type fame, a few weeks ago.

And of course I love the upcoming Firefox 2, already in release candidate 1 stage.

So it was disappointing not to find Rojo in the list of feed readers that Firefox supports. There comes the question: what’s a mozillorojoish guy’s got to do?

How To Add Rojo in Firefox With Just Three Lines

These steps are based on what Ben Goodger wrote some months ago in his Inside Firefox blog. Thanks Ben!

I assume you already have a Rojo account, you’ve logged in and you have Firefox 2 running.

• Type about:config in the address bar and press Enter. You will see a list of preferences.
• Type browser.contentHandlers in the filter box and press Enter. Now you see a smaller list.
• Each preference is of the form: browser.contentHandlers.types.#.something where # is a number, which goes from 0 to 5 in my Firefox, and something is title, type or uri.
• You clever quick guy already got the pattern here and know what to do, good for you! For the rest of us let’s elaborate: you have to create an additional set of preferences, three additional lines. We will base our new lines in the 0 numbered lines and will use number 6.
• Right-click on the first line, browser.contentHandlers.types.0.title and select Copy Name.
• Right-click, select New, String, paste the name you copied and change the number from 0 to 6, or another corresponding number if you have more than five sets of lines.
• Enter the name of the feed reader you are adding, in our case: Rojo. You won’t see your new line automatically in the list, just press Enter in the filter box on top if you need to.
• Create a new instance of the second line, browser.contentHandlers.types.0.type, following the same procedure and also changing 0 to 6. You can also right-click and copy the value here, application/vnd.mozilla.maybe.feed, for that won’t change.
• Create the third line based on browser.contentHandlers.types.0.uri and use the following value for Rojo: http://www.rojo.com/add-subscription/?resource=%s. I got it from the bookmarklet, you can find a similar url for any other feed reader. Use %s as a placeholder for the feed url.
• Restart Firefox and you are set!

Too Many Clicks?

Ok, just open your prefs.js file (in my Fedora box I found it at /home/my-user-name/.mozilla/firefox/uk3kd43k.default/prefs.js) and add these lines:


user_pref("browser.contentHandlers.types.6.title", “Rojo");
user_pref("browser.contentHandlers.types.6.type", “application/vnd.mozilla.maybe.feed");
user_pref("browser.contentHandlers.types.6.uri", “http://www.rojo.com/add-subscription/?resource=%s");


Set your default feed reader the first time you subscribe to any feed or using the feeds tab in Firefox’s preferences menu.

Now you can click on any feed link, including the icon appearing in the address bar, and you are already set. One click subscription to any feed.

Ready?, why not testing it here?