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POSTED
30 Mar 2006, 08:43

TAGGED
autodiscovery, firefox, rss, safari

rss auto-discovery

Are Firefox and Safari “finding” your library’s RSS feed?* I realized the other day that neither browser was picking up ours, so I did some scouring around and found some really basic code you can include in your <head> tags to facilitate RSS auto-discovery. The code (and a short but good explanation) is here. If you’re publishing a feed, it’s a really good idea to make it as findable as possible!

*look for in the address bar in Firefox;
*look for rss in the address bar in Safari.

13 Comments

Posted by
Bill Drew
30 Mar 2006 @ 09:16

This may not always the case! I have it set up for our library pages and I do not get the RSS icon showing up in my Firefox address bar at all. Am I doing something wrong?

Posted by
amanda
30 Mar 2006 @ 10:38

Hey Bill – I just checked your library page and I see the orange icon in my Fireforx address bar. It’s pointing to your feed: http://library.morrisville.edu/rss_feed.xml. (I’m on a PC right now so can’t check Safari). Are you on an older version of Firefox?

Posted by
Eby
30 Mar 2006 @ 11:25

Bill it’s showing the rss icon in safari too. I also used my aggregator and it found the feed successfully. This isn’t just important for browsers, some aggregators use it to find feeds and let the user just put in the URL of the homepage instead of finding the rss url. You can also list multiple feeds with different titles and some aggregators will allow you to choose which one you want to subscribe to. Site do this when they offer multiple flavors or rss/atom or if they have feeds that are summary, full posts, comments, etc.

Posted by
amanda
30 Mar 2006 @ 11:18

A really good point, Eby. Thanks for pointing that out.

Posted by
Bill Drew
30 Mar 2006 @ 16:35

I actually see a feed icon in the address box. It is a radar or radio telescope dish, not the new feed icon. That is why I missed it.

Posted by
Abigail
31 Mar 2006 @ 12:15

Very helpful post, thanks! It’s also worth noting that you can use this code on pages other than your blog. I just added it to our library home page, where people see our headlines, so they can subscribe even if they never make it to the blog page.

Posted by
amanda
31 Mar 2006 @ 14:12

Hi Abigail – yes! we did that too! Initially, I just added it to the blog page but then I stepped back and asked myself: why not on ALL library pages? So, that’s what we did

Posted by
Shannon Whitley
4 Apr 2006 @ 15:13

I’ve added an auto discovery tool to my site that will read the standard [link] tags, but it will also go one step further and try to follow other [a] tags. If your browser isn’t finding everything on a site, goto http://www.feedlinx.com.

Posted by
Shannon Whitley
4 Apr 2006 @ 15:20

If you are looking for library-type sites, take a look at PostRef (http://www.postref.com). This site collects online references and makes it easy to perform multiple searches. It has some special features for readers and writers.

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rss auto-discovery

13 Comments