Jenny Levine: Trying it out. After reading RSS auto-discovery yesterday, Jenny added a link tag to her site which points to her syndicated RSS feed. I added a similar tag to my site. Matt Griffith added it to his site. Now, he says, I just need an aggregator that supports it.
Here’s something that may connect the dots and spur CMS developers and weblog authors to implement this as a new standard:
Follow the link for your news aggregator, and you’ll see a page with a “Subscribe” link. This is a bookmarklet, which you can drag to your links toolbar (IE 5+, Netscape 6+, Mozilla should all work) to create a “Subscribe” button. Whenever you visit a site (that implements the link tag) and you want to add it to your news aggregator, just click your “Subscribe” button and away you go.
Try it on my site now. Then visit Jenny’s site and try it there. Then visit Matt’s site and try it again. Or Eric Vitiello, 0xDECAFBAD, DJ Adams, Ugo Cei, Christopher Ryan, ZopeNewbies, Ben Hammersley, Rael Dornfest, Dan Lyke. (The list keeps growing. Boy, I’d love to see it on Scripting News. Update: Dave Winer has added the link tag to Scripting News. Thanks!)
Since the bookmarklet, in effect, asks the site where its feed is, it will work with any type of site that implements the tag: Radio, Manila, Movable Type, GreyMatter, Blogger Pro, whatever. If we can persuade existing weblog authors to insert this one line of code, and then get it into the default templates of weblogging tools, and we could make news aggregation an order of magnitude easier.
Movable Type: The next release of Movable Type will include the tag to MT’s default templates. If you’re already running Movable Type, insert this into the head section of your Main Index template and each of your Archive templates (6/2/2002: example updated to reflect latest standard):
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="<$MTBlogURL$>index.rdf" />
I never thought I’d say it, but… Bing!
Update: several syndication services also now support this.
MaximumAardvark: I’ve added the requesite code for an as-yet-nonexistent aggregator to automatically find my RSS feed.
No, no, that’s the cool part: the bookmarklets work with the news aggregators that already exist. The aggregators themselves could be updated to auto-discover a site’s RSS feed on their own, but the bookmarklets work today.
Phil Ringnalda is patiently waiting for this to reach a tipping point and become mainstream. Being an early adopter is like that. You can use the bookmarklet at News Is Free or Syndic8 while you wait.
This would make a cool Mozilla sidebar. Surf to any page of a site, see the site’s current RSS feed in the sidebar, with a link to subscribe. Wish I knew how to program Mozilla sidebars. (Thanks, Bill for the link.)
BlahStuff: It’s a grass-roots effort to define how an aspect of HTML is utilized.
Actually, this part of HTML was designed to be extensible; the only trick is getting enough people (and tools) to agree on how to interpret a particular extension.
In email, Robert K. Brown asks, I’ve got that cute little Radio coffee cup that will allow a Radio user to subscribe to my feed … How has the subscription process changed
because of this?
Answer: keep your XML coffee cup, and add this too. The XML icon is a link, meant to be clicked; the link tag is just invisible metadata. Links are for humans; metadata is for machines. Metadata lets programs be smarter, and easier to use. For instance, current versions of Radio and AmphetaDesk require you to type (or paste) in the entire URL of a feed in order to subscribe to it. (The coffee cup link allows Radio users to shortcut this process, but it only works for Radio, and only if the weblog author supports it. AmphetaDesk has a different addressing scheme, other aggregators like Aggie have no addressing scheme at all, and many syndicateable sites have no coffee cup link, just a regular XML link you have to copy and paste.)
But what if you could just type the address of the site itself, and your aggregator could ask the site where its feed was and then subscribe to it? Wouldn’t that be easier? That’s the kind of improvement that metadata makes possible.
In a later email, Robert ponders the possibility of Google picking up on these tags and exposing it somehow. You can already search Google by file type (use “filetype:rss” as part of your search), but this misses a lot (like “filetype:rdf”, or “filetype:xml”, or feeds generated dynamically by PHP scripts).
Or how about GoogleBox 2.0? You could write a script using the Google API to find sites related to yours, then automatically ask each site for its RSS feed. (Maybe a future version of the Google API could even return this information as part of your search results.) That sounds useful.
Ben Hammersley: Automatic Discovery of RSS feeds. By adding a line like this … a site would be providing metadata as to the location of its feed – and this would allow newsreaders, browsers and search engines to automatically locate the feed.
Dave Winer: From the More-Flies-With-Honey Dept. I don’t think the idea is too great … I can’t imagine giving users instructions that include “View the source of the page and if it has a link element..”
God no, don’t do that; make software that does that for them. Think of all the places during the course of a program where you have a site’s main URL; now imagine that in all of those places, your program could get the site’s RSS feed too. Sam Ruby wants his aggregator to suggest feeds that would be of interest. Think of all the ways you can determine what sites might be of interest:
Now take each of those sites and find its associated RSS feed, and suggest it to Sam.
Sunday update: please note, the standard has changed slightly. If you implemented the old version, please read this and update your site and/or tool accordingly. (Don’t you love being an early adopter?)
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