Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Read online RSS 2.0 or later in PSP

In order to view your RSS feeds online with your PSP, you will need to set up an account with Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com) or a similar online RSS feed-reading service. Once you have a Bloglines account, turn on your PSP, navigate to Network Internet Browser, and hit the X button to launch the browser.

Make sure that you have your WLAN switch on, are in range of a WiFi Internet connection, and that you have properly set up such a connection.

Once the browser launches and your PSP connects to the Internet, hit the Triangle button to bring up the Browser's address bar. Navigate to the address bar using the directional keypad and hit the X button. This will bring up the PSP's text entry control panel. Type in the address for Bloglines Mobile (http://www.bloglines.com/mobile/) and hit Enter. The Bloglines Mobile page will load.

Hit the Triangle button to leave the browser's control screen and view the web page full-screen. Select the text field next to Email and enter the email address with which you set up your Bloglines account, then enter the appropriate password, select the Enter button, and hit the X button on your PSP. Fortunately, the PSP handles cookies nicely, so the next time you visit Bloglines, your PSP will remember your account information, and you will not have to redo all of this typing. This will take you to a simplified, mobile-ready version of your Bloglines feed page, where you can read through all the feeds you have added to your Bloglines account.

I suggest that you bookmark this page. Hit the Triangle button to bring up the browser's interface, select the heart-shaped icon, which is the Bookmarks control panel, and hit the X button. Choose My Bookmarks, hit the X button again, highlight "Add to Bookmarks," and hit the X button again.

Simply navigate up and down the page, hitting X whenever you want to select a bit you want to read. If you want to visit the page of one of the posts you are reading in Bloglines, but do not want to leave the Bloglines page you are viewing, simply select the link, and press and hold the X button. This will launch the link in one of the browser's three tabs. After you have read the post and want to return to the Bloglines page, simply hold down on the Square button and hit the L trigger to switch back to the first tab.

If you want, you can always navigate over to the normal Bloglines site by clicking the Full Bloglines link on the Bloglines Mobile page. The PSP is perfectly capable of running the full version of Bloglines, but the right column of the layout tends to get oddly squished in the PSP browser. The mobile version, however, will be quicker and will run a lower risk of returning an out-of-memory error after you've been surfing for a while.

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