Many news-type sites may be useful as sidebar panels, but the site maintainers may be unable or unwilling to create their own panels. Therefore, it would be useful if users could create their own sidebar panel based on a particular Web page -- a panel which consisted of a list of the headline-type links from that page, and which was updated on a schedule specified by the user. This would work roughly in the following way. 1. User selects `Create ...' from somewhere in the sidebar UI (probably the Customize dialog). 2. Assistant gets user to enter a name for the panel. 3. Assistant asks user to click on the first, second, and third links in the Web page which are of the type the user wants to include in the panel. 4. Assistant explores the DOM of the page to find out how those links are identical in structure, class, or whatever, and checks with the user that the pattern is correct (by showing a list of the rest of the links of the same type). 5. User completes the assistant, and the sidebar panel is created. Note that this wouldn't work for sites where the headline is not used for the link, e.g. Slashdot and Mozillazine. This could be extended to include features like showing non-link text (e.g. number of comments) after each link, but just the links part would be quite hard enough to implement for now I think. :-) When anyone wants to do this, yell at me and I'll provide a UI spec.

Sorry, step 3 should begin `Assistant asks user to click on the first, second, and *last* links ...'. This is so that the panel knows where to stop.

Am currently working on a project which automatically pulls headlines from a selected number of webpages.I suppose it would be easy enough to implement a version of it for this purpose.I'll have a look into it in a few months (after finals!)

See also bug 50063, "[RFE] Ability to enter custom URL for sidebar tab".

spam : changing qa to sujay (New Sidebar QA)

check out www.sidebars.org if you make a sidebar you can submit it there and other people can search sidebars. the site is new.

reassigning matt's old bugs.

Safari 3.0 introduced an equivalent feature in the form of Web Clip.