Re-post: The Court In The Act guide to post-purge downloading (for Firefox)

I keep getting asked about this by various people - hence the repost - so feel free to spread it. I'd rather you included a reference back here though.

Ever since the removal of Megaupload and various other filehosting websites from cyberspace, almost a week ago now, people have been realising how much harder it is to come across downloads now. In the future, one might be able to just hop onto Google Blog Search again with the album name and blogurl:blogspot.com, but at the moment, this takes so long searching through pages with dead links that it's really not worth it. The key to post-purge downloading without resorting to p2p, torrents or other horrible things like that is opportunism - one must simply download the albums which pop up on blogs you follow. It's best to follow a lot of blogs. However, loading the front page of every blog every day does get somewhat tiresome, so here's the best way in my experience to avoid doing that (on Firefox):

Step 1: Go to the front page of the blog you want to follow. Click 'Bookmarks', then 'Subscribe to this page'. This allows you to receive an RSS (or Atom) feed from most blogs (although a very few will have them disabled). For instance, this is how I'd follow the Degen Erik blog:

2. Select a folder for the feed to go in. Although not strictly necessary, it helps to keep your browser comparatively clean when you follow blogs on an industrial scale like I do. Personally, I filter them by how frequently they are updated and then by genre. As Degen Erik is a punk blog which is updated several times daily, it would go in my 'Daily metal/hardcore' folder.

3. Now, assuming you follow lots of blogs, it's still a pain to keep up to date with the last post in each blog and just quickly look at the feed to see whether it has been updated or not. Therefore, I use a very useful add-on called Boox which makes the names of blogs which have been updated bold, and puts the number of updates next to them (right click and select 'Mark As Read' if you don't want to read the rest of the updates). Boox can be found at http://joliclic.free.fr/mozilla/boox/en/index.php.

4. I find it best to check daily so that you well and truly can stay ahead of the copyrightists - this takes me up to fifteen minutes maximum depending on how much I find that I want (keep in mind that I do follow 200+ blogs). If all has gone well, the end effect should look something like this (note that I have some other addones which may change the exact appearance for you):

I hope this helps.