Microsummaries - the new RSS?

If you're using Firefox 2 then you can join the three of us using its great new Microsummaries feature. A website can provide a microsummary, in which case you can think of it as a short, single-item RSS feed. Indeed, some bloggers have already set them up to provide notification of new posts. However, what's more interesting is that you can get Firefox to parse a page to produce a microsummary itself. Thus, if a website has a snippet of information that you want constantly-updated access to, then you can have it.

I became interested in this topic because I found that the current temperature provided by the ForecastFox extension did not match the official current temperature for my area provided by the Bureau of Meteorology, and I thought about creating a bookmarklet that could screenscrape the temperature from the BOM site. Well, it turns out that microsummaries do exactly that, but with much less effort.

Although the production of a microsummary generator is relatively straightforward, there is some coding involved. Fortunately, there is an even easier way:

• install the Microsummary Generator Builder Firefox extension
• visit the BOM web page
• right-mouse-click and choose Microsummary generator
• move the mouse around to make a box surround the snippet of interest, then left-mouse-click
• choose Install Generator
• bookmark the page, but in the Add Bookmark dialog box, notice that the Name field is now a drop-down list (yes, it's subtle, but it's the only way you can tell if there's a microsummary for that page). From that list you can choose either the normal page title, or the snippet you just chose
• you'll probably want to put that bookmark on your bookmarks toolbar so that it's easily visible

Installing the generator actually just creates an XML file in your profile's new microsummary-generators folder which describes how to parse the web page in question. If you manually edit that XML file then you have to go to that bookmark's properties, and change from the microsummary to the static title, then back to the microsummary, to get the changes to be noticed. Also, you can happily uninstall the Microsummary Generator Builder once it's done its job of creating that XML file, not that it'll cause much harm where it is.

Note that the Microsummary Generator Builder does not ask you to set the microsummary's update frequency. To configure this, add an update field with an interval in minutes to the xml, such as:

...
</transform>
</template>
<update interval="15" />
</generator>

Finally, note that microsummaries can't be created from pages on FTP sites. Despite every step of the process working, when you go to bookmark the page the microsummary drop-down won't appear.