So, mac friends, I ask you…Do you use the RSS feature in your mac Mail yet?? I just figured out the “show in inbox” feature several months ago and I’m loving it – so I thought I would share with my other mac family members who are dog paddling their way through the Mac’lantic like me, how all this really works.

RSS, u may know is just a simple way of saying “what’s new on this site” or “keep me informed when they post something new here.” Well, I tend to forget to go check out all my pal’s blogs and I often find myself playing catch up and reading the last 30 posts of my bestie’s life journey…omg, You had a baby? What???

I am, however, in the religious habit of knocking out that little RED number above my mac mail eagle-soaring inbox. So, I thought to myself, I wish there were a way I could just get my friends new posts into my inbox, since it’s “sooooo much trouble” now to actually click that bookmark link in my browser….so once again, the Mac’lantic life-savers came to my rescue.

I’m using Firefox (but Safari has this built in feature as well) – just go to your favorite website, like your daily news, or your favorite friends blog, and click the little blue RSS button on the right side of the web address box (or you can click ‘Bookmarks,’ then ‘Subscribe to this page’). The button looks like this in Firefox:

A drop down box appears with options, just click “Subscribe to RSS” (not sure yet if it matters which one, but I choose RSS 2.0). Click “Specify a Custom Feed URL” – the URL (or link) should already be listed in the box…THEN, this is the fun part, make sure the BOX is checked “Show in Inbox.” And Voilà! You’re done!

Now go open that little eagle-soarin’ Mail application, select View, Show Mailboxes. Look down the list in the box on the left to see the RSS folder. Open it, and you shall see your new pal’s blog, with most likely the last 10 – 20 posts (and they should have popped into your Inbox as well.) IF you want to just READ the blog post in the RSS folder instead of your inbox, right-click on the RSS box for that feed, and simply uncheck ’show in inbox.’ happy RSS’ing.

My version looked a little something like this:

When he embarked on his daily – Shower, Coffee, Desk, Email, Weather, News, Reading, Quiet Time routine….there I was pasted right on his screen, showing some love in the first part of his day.

Those who know me understand that simply finishing a project is never enough. Noh-way! We must go overboard, over-the-top, above and beyond to get our point across (as expressed in my usual lengthy blog posts). So I continued to meddle on his previously customized Citation 10 desktop and decided I truly needed a background graphic with a giant cupids arrow pointing the way, to make my efforts well established.

So I created from scratch, the jenn-style background – perfecting my love note mission (which he *loved* by the way!).

To add to the fun, a friend on facebook asked me how in the world I did it. And the one semester in college teacher wanna be came bubbling out. I put Jing Project, (a free video cast tool) to good use. I also had to use ScreenCast to publish the file, but all in all my little sweet-home-alabama video tutoral took about 15 minutes, and was surprisingly fun!

It’s a slightly rough round one for my video tutorials – but here it is….enjoy!