Changing Vista’s RSS Gadget
Posted by Konrad on June 13, 2008
Its unusual to see such a user-unfriendly way of managing (or changing) the default settings in a program. Windows Vista ships with Vista Sidebar, a gadget/widget engine which brings limited but extensible functionality to Windows Vista.
The main criticism I had initially was with the RSS widget – there seemed to be no way of changing the default feeds that shipped with Vista from the default and fairly bland MSN rss feeds. Despite tinkering with the widget and sidebar program, I eventually conceded defeat and did a bit of digging.
It turns out, rather counter-intuitively that the way to change the RSS feeds is via Internet Explorer. Fire up Internet Explorer and hit “Control+J“, this is the keyboard shortcut to bring up the feed window.
Once here, you can add / delete / modify the RSS feeds that Vista shows to your heart’s content. In doing so, you expose the greatest weakness of Vista’s default RSS widget, it does not scale very well. Whilst in “at-a-glance” RSS perusal for a few feeds works rather well, its over simplification is its greatest downfall.
There is no easy way to change between RSS feeds / groups (it has to be done via a menu each time) nor is there a way to dismiss headlines which have been read. This greatly limits the usefulness of this widget for any serious RSS subscriber.
I had a brief look, but I could not find a 3rd party, general purpose RSS feed widget on the Microsoft Live Widget site. Whilst this gadget is certainly of use, its limitations greatly diminish its usefulness.
