Here at ReadWriteWeb, we’re big fans of the Chrome web browser. Most of the bloggers here have made the switch, abandoning Firefox and Safari for the new, speedy WebKit-based browser from Google. And with the addition of extensions, we’ve found even more reasons to love it – over 1500 of them, actually. We each have our favorites of course, but recently, we came across one we just had to share with our readers: The ReadWriteWeb News Notifier!
The ReadWriteWeb News Notifier isn’t an official creation from anyone here on the ReadWriteWeb team, but is the work of a development company called idio, the creators of a digital publishing platform technology. (Incidentally, if they did this looking for blog coverage, we have to hand it to them – that was genius!)
Like any other Google Chrome extension, all you have to do is click the blue “Install” button to add the button to your Chrome web browser. Once installed, the RWW extension alerts you when new articles are published on our website very much like how the Google Mail Checker Plus extension alerts you to new mail in your inbox – by displaying an unread count next to the icon. When you click the button, the article list will appear featuring the headline, the first couple of sentences, and social sharing buttons for posting to Digg, Facebook, and Twitter using bit.ly-shortened URLs.
If that’s all the extension did, those features alone would make it worthy of praise, but it goes even further. You can also customize the button to only display notifications from the areas of the website you’re interested in. So for example, if you want to receive alerts when there are new posts on the business-friendly ReadWriteEnterprise and ReadWriteCloud but not the more consumer-focused ReadWriteWeb itself, you could check those two boxes and uncheck the rest.
Finally, an included search box at the top lets you sift through the ReadWriteWeb archives for older posts using our site’s own custom search engine.
The ReadWriteWeb News Notifier checks for updates every 60 seconds, so you’ll never miss out on the news. Although we didn’t design this extension ourselves, we couldn’t have done a better job if we tried. A big thanks goes out to the guys over at idio – we love our extension. Every website should get one of these!
