Date: 08/27/05 (Mozilla)    Keywords: rss, browser, xml

A few days ago, I shared in this community, an article about the introduction of Firefox to several thousand students in France in an effort to promote open source computer applications. It was an excellent opportunity to expose Firefox to high school students and their parents. When they finally go to college, Firefox would be their most probable default browser.

Today, I ran across another interesting entry from The Hatchet, an independent student on-line newspaper from the University of Chicago. The students commented, that "while Thunderbird isn't anything new - it's been available for download in one form or another since December - it's now starting to get major attention. In April, Harvard University made a customized version available to students and faculty, and in May, New York University's Stern School of Business started using the program. This fall the University of Chicago will distribute Thunderbird to students."

Thunderbird is now being used by top notch U.S. Universities. Their students and faculty members are excited about:

* Management of multiple e-mail accounts
* Customization features like themes, plug-ins and extensions
* Live Bookmarks using RSS feeds

This is what they wrote about Live Bookmarks and RSS feeds:

"On the left side of the screen, along with a list of your e-mail folders, you can create a list of your favorite news sources along with their headlines. Today, most blogs and online news services, including The Hatchet, offer RSS feeds that allow you to subscribe to their news and receive news on your computer as soon as it's published or posted online. The benefit of such a system is that you get all your headlines in one place as opposed to jumping all over the Internet."

"In my Thunderbird client, I have a list of my news sources - the Houston Chronicle sports section, The Washington Post Metro section, and the blog Wonkette, to name a few, above a list of my e-mail folders. Each headline appears as a new message in a folder named for the news source - click on a headline and the story is opened in the message window."

To access your favorite news sources via Thunderbird, just go to a news site, find the orange button labeled RSS or XML, right click, and select "copy link location" or "copy shortcut," and paste it into your news management section."

The student's ended their on-line newspaper with these very encouraging words; " Mozilla Thunderbird can help simplify your life - there's no reason not to download this program." I feel so proud to see that Firefox and Thunderbird are surfacing in the educational community. Thunderbird is now in college.

If you want to see a beautiful Crystal Thunderbird picture, click the link below:

Enjoy,

Omar.-

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/mozilla/311370.html