I’ve recently become fascinated with the idea of using RSS to maintain a list of items rather than a feed of news or a log. If used in that way, Mozilla Firefox‘s live bookmarks feature, all of a sudden, has a practical use. My website evolved from one links page, that has now become my ilias.ca main page. I originally created a links page to help users in two ways:
– users wouldn’t have to go through the hassle of maintaining a list of help sites for Mozilla or Netscape.
– users wouldn’t have to clog up their bookmarks with help sites. They could bookmark one site, and use that as a gateway.
It seems to me ‘maintaining a set of bookmarks for others’ is what Live Bookmarks is all about. You set up a Live Bookmark to ‘ilias.ca help sites’, and now all the sites appear in that Live Bookmark. Whenever I update a link, add a link, or remove a link, that change is reflected in your Live Bookmark.
And so, I’ve created an RSS formatted file for that purpose. Mozilla Firefox users will see the 
, when visiting the ilias.ca main page, and can click on it to create the Live Bookmark.
I was thinking about the concept a little more and realized that if you store bookmarks in an RSS formatted file, you can use them on a customizable web portal, like Google’s Personalized Home. Supposedly, Internet Explorer 7 is supposed to have much greater RSS support. Maybe it would be possible to actually make Firefox and Internet Explorer use the same bookmarks RSS file. Oh the possibilities…