1Gbits Blog — VPS & Server Hosting News by Sina N

Keep up with the 1Gbits blog without going looking for it.

1Gbits Blog puts new posts from the 1Gbits hosting blog in your browser toolbar. The extension checks the blog on a schedule you choose, marks the icon when something new is published, and shows you the headlines in a single click. No feed reader account, no email signup, no tab left open in the background.

If you run servers for a living, the useful writing is scattered and easy to miss. This is a small, quiet way to stop missing it.

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WHAT IT DOES
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UNREAD COUNT ON THE TOOLBAR
A small badge on the extension icon shows how many posts you have not read yet. No badge means nothing new. It is the entire status display, and it is designed to be ignorable until it is not.

ONE-CLICK READING LIST
Click the icon and you get the recent posts: headline, a short excerpt, the author, and how long ago it went up. Click any post to open it in a new tab. That post is marked read, the badge drops by one, and the popup closes.

DESKTOP NOTIFICATIONS
Optionally get a system notification the moment a new post is published. Click the notification and the post opens directly. If several posts land at once, you get the first few plus a short summary rather than a stack of alerts — a bulk publish should not take over your desktop.

Notifications are off-by-default in spirit: nothing is sent until you have the extension installed and the setting enabled, and you can turn them off entirely while keeping the badge.

WORKS WHEN THE NETWORK DOES NOT
If a scheduled check fails — you are offline, on a captive-portal wifi, or the blog is briefly unreachable — the extension keeps showing the last list it successfully fetched and quietly notes that the update failed. You do not get an empty popup and an error where your reading list used to be.

FOLLOWS YOUR SYSTEM THEME
Light and dark are both first-class. The popup and settings page follow whatever your operating system asks for, and switch immediately when you do.

READS ANY FEED
The extension is pointed at the 1Gbits blog out of the box, but the feed address is a setting. Point it at a different blog, a staging site, or your own writing, and it will work the same way. RSS 2.0, Atom, RSS 1.0/RDF and JSON Feed are all supported, and the format is detected automatically — you do not have to know or care which one a site serves.

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HOW IT WORKS
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Once installed, the extension fetches the blog feed and treats everything already published as read. That first fetch is deliberately silent: installing a reader should not immediately produce thirty notifications and a badge full of posts you have never seen.

After that it checks on your chosen interval. Anything genuinely new — a post whose identifier it has not seen before — increments the badge and, if enabled, raises a notification. Posts you have already opened stay read. Reordering, edits, and re-publishes do not re-trigger anything.

Checks run in the background using the browser's own scheduling, so nothing keeps running when you are not using the browser. Browsers throttle background work aggressively to save battery, which means a check can run a little later than the interval you picked. That is deliberate browser behaviour rather than a fault in the extension.

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SETTINGS
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FEED URL
Which feed to follow. Defaults to the 1Gbits blog. A "Test this feed" button fetches the address immediately and tells you how many posts it found and what the newest one is called, so you can confirm an address works before relying on it.

CHECK INTERVAL
Anywhere from every 15 minutes to once a day. Hourly is the default and suits most blogs — a hosting blog does not publish often enough to justify anything faster, and a longer interval uses less battery.

POSTS TO KEEP
How many posts to store and show, from 5 to 100. Thirty by default.

DESKTOP NOTIFICATIONS
On or off. Turning this off leaves the badge working, so you still see that something is new without being interrupted.

UNREAD COUNT ON THE TOOLBAR ICON
On or off, independently of notifications. Some people want the badge and no notifications; some want the opposite; both are supported.

Settings sync across browsers where you are signed in, so configuring the extension on one machine configures it everywhere. Which posts you have read stays local to each device, since that genuinely differs per machine.

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PRIVACY
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This extension collects nothing. That is not a marketing line, it is a description of what the code does.

• No analytics. No telemetry. No usage tracking of any kind.
• No advertising or tracking SDKs.
• No account, no signup, no login.
• Nothing is sent to any server operated by the extension's authors, because there is no such server.

The only network request it ever makes is fetching the blog feed itself, and that request is deliberately made without credentials — it does not carry your cookies, so it cannot be tied to any session you have with the site.

Your settings and your read-post list are stored using the browser's own extension storage. They stay in your browser. Uninstalling removes them.

WHAT IT CANNOT DO
The extension has no access to the pages you browse. It cannot read, modify, or see any website you visit. It has no content scripts. Its only host permission is for the blog domain it fetches the feed from — nothing else on the web is visible to it.

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PERMISSIONS, AND WHY
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Every permission the extension requests is listed here with the specific feature that needs it. If any of these seem broader than the feature warrants, that is worth telling us about.

STORAGE
Saves your settings and remembers which posts you have already read. Without it the extension would forget everything each time the browser restarted.

ALARMS
Schedules the periodic check for new posts. This is the browser's own battery-friendly scheduler; the alternative is a timer that keeps a process alive, which is worse for your machine.

NOTIFICATIONS
Shows the desktop notification when a post is published. Only used when you have that setting enabled.

ACCESS TO THE BLOG DOMAIN
Fetches the feed. This is the single site the extension can reach.

There is no "read your browsing history", no "access your data on all websites", and no host permission beyond the feed's own domain unless you deliberately point the extension at a different site, which asks you first.

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FREQUENTLY ASKED
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Q: Do I need a 1Gbits account?
No. The blog is public and the extension reads it as any visitor would. It never signs in as you, and it works identically whether or not you are a customer.

Q: Does it slow down my browsing?
No. It does no work on the pages you visit — it has no access to them at all. Between scheduled checks it is entirely idle, and each check is a single small request.

Q: Why did my check run late?
Browsers deliberately delay background work to save battery, particularly on laptops and when the browser has been idle. A 15-minute interval is a floor, not a guarantee. Opening the popup always triggers a fresh check immediately.

Q: I clicked a post but the badge did not go down.
Opening a post marks it read. If the count did not move, the popup may have been showing a cached list — click the refresh icon. "Mark all as read" clears the badge in one go.

Q: Can I follow a different blog?
Yes. Change the feed address in settings and use "Test this feed" to confirm it works. Any RSS, Atom or JSON feed will do.

Q: The popup says it could not load posts.
Usually a network problem, and it resolves on the next check. If it persists, open settings and press "Test this feed" — it reports the exact error, which distinguishes a wrong address from an unreachable site.

Q: Why does Firefox ask for permission separately?
Firefox grants host access on request rather than at install. That is a Firefox design decision applying to all extensions; the "Grant access" button in the popup handles it in one click.

Q: How do I stop the notifications but keep the badge?
Settings, turn off "Desktop notifications", leave "Unread count on the toolbar icon" on.

Q: Does it work offline?
It shows the last posts it fetched. New posts obviously need a connection, and it recovers on its own once you are back online.

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ABOUT 1GBITS
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1Gbits provides hosting infrastructure: dedicated servers, virtual private servers, cloud VPS and storage VPS, across data centres in Europe, North America and Asia. The blog covers the practical side of running that infrastructure — choosing between virtual and dedicated hardware, storage and network performance, security, and the operational details that are easier to learn from someone else's writeup than from your own outage.

This extension is a reader for that blog. It is not a control panel, and it does not manage servers or accounts.

More at https://1gbits.com

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FEEDBACK
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Bug reports and feature requests are welcome. If something is broken, a description of what you expected and what happened instead is genuinely more useful than a one-star rating, and gets it fixed faster.

If the extension ever asks for a permission you did not expect, or behaves in a way this description does not cover, please report it.