What are they?
As easy as bookmarking a page
Check your auctions from your bookmarks
Microsummaries are a brand new feature in the new version of Firefox. They are a live title bookmark, meaning that a bookmark will update itself. For instance, an eBay microsummary could tell you the current highest bid and time left on a bid, or a BBC News microsummary could tell you the breaking news.
How they work?
Microsummaries work in two different ways. The first is through a sites own microsummary. This generally will be a short text file which contains the content of the microsummary, which the site's back-end will update. Your browser will keep a record of this and will fetch its content on a set interval (usually 30 minutes). These work by bookmarking a page.
The second way is to use a microsummary generator. These are made by third-party programmers and can be easily installed. These generators get the web site's page, parse it's content and break it down into a small chunk of content which will then be used as your microsummary. These work by installing the microsummary generator, then by bookmarking the page you want the generator to work with.
So, they're a bit like RSS feeds?
Yes, in a way! They're a way of getting content from a web site without actually having to visit the site. The main advantage over RSS feeds is that any site can use microsummaries if the site has a related generator, and any content from the site can be used.
Can I use microsummaries?
At the moment, the only browser that supports microsummaries is Mozilla Firefox 2.0, which is free and works amazingly well. If you've not tried it yet, then give it a go! We hope that other browsers, such as Opera, Apple's Safari and maybe one day, Microsoft's Internet Explorer, will implement the feature into their new versions.
Examples
The Register
Quick Tips Online
There are two separate ways to use microsummaries; the first is to use site author's own microsummaries, the second is to use a third party generator.
Site microsummaries
Sites like The Register and Quick Online Tips use microsummaries. More examples can be found on the Mozilla Foundation site. If you are a site owner and have microsummaries, let us know and we'll put your site here for all to see.
Site generators
There are generators for:
If you have seen or made any useful generators, please let us know by emailing ms-at-microsummaries.org and we'll host them on the site.
Icons
Feed Icons managed to create a standard RSS icon
You know how RSS has its own lovely bright orange icon? Well, we are currently hoping to get a similar icon so that we can have microsummaries instantly recognisable.
The idea we have for the logo is that:
- It is the same shape as the RSS logo for standardization sake [i.e. a square with rounded corners]
- It should look good at a small pixel size [16px by 16px] as well as a larger pixel size
- It isn't so "Web 2.0" that it looks dated in a years time
If you have a design, or even a simple idea, please let us know! Email us at ms-at-microsummaries.org, we won't bite!
In the meantime...
Add to your site
It's not difficult to implement too
Have your own site and want to add a microsummary? All you need to do is generate a file which its content will update. The file can be any format as long as it can display text. In the file, there should be a short text string which will be the microsummary. i.e. the BBC could have "BBC News: Latest News: Microsummaries are the best" as their microsummary, which would update to show the latest news item. You then will need to link to it within the <head> of your site using the following code:
<link rel="microsummary" href="path/to/microsummary" />
Now, whenever people bookmark your site, they have the option of their own static title or your special dynamic title.
If you are using Wordpress as a blogging system, there is now a microsummary plug-in, which makes it easy for you to output a microsummary. See here for more details.
Developers: Roll your own generators
To build a microsummary generators, you need intermediate XPath/XSLT skills and some regular expression knowledge. Mozilla's developers site has some great tutorials on building generators
About this site
This site is by rikrikrik and is not affiliated with any browser vendor. We are not looking for any money or anything, this is merely a promotional site for what we feel is a great feature that we would like to see implemented in other browsers.
We are also currently developing a Firefox extension to work in a similar way to how the current RSS feed alert and the Tails Microformat extension work. Please keep checking back at this site for updates.