How to set up RSS feeds in the Windows 7 Feed Gadget

I have a bunch of web servers, for which I receive monitoring alerts by email. I discovered I can get these as RSS, so I thought, "Perfect! I'll watch these from my Windows 7 desktop. I know there's a feed widget."

Not so fast!!

When you first add the Feeds Gadget to Windows 7, it may appear as if Microsoft only wanted you to be able to view THEIR feeds in the gadget. Clicking on Options just allows you to choose All or a particular MS feed to view (as well as how many items to display.) There is no mention of how to add new feeds, so at first I gave up.

The next day I Googled it. Turns out the wonderful Paul Thurrott had my answer (btw his Podcast on Twit.tv is awesome.) The Feeds Gadget 'feeds' off the RSS subscriptions you've set up in Internet Explorer. So all you do is:

1. Open the feed address in IE
2. IE will bring up a subscription box in yellow at the top of the page.
3. Click subscribe.
4. Now go back to the Feeds gadget and right-click, then on Options.
5. You will see your feed. Choose it!

So there you go - now I can see my servers go down right from my desktop!

Nice tip on extracting downloaded Youtube videos from your Firefox cache

This guy says it all - http://xp-rience.blogspot.com/2008/01/copy-flv-file-from-firefox-cache.html

Basically you monitor your Firefox cache directory and look for the file being created. Then simply rename the file as an .flv