December 10, 2004
Make XML Button do something

This is just now annoying me, which is odd. I've been reading dozens of blogs for nearly 3 years. But I never bothered to get an aggregator. It's only the advent of RSS Broadcatching that has led me to the RSS/Atom promised land.

So my annoyance: What the hell is the point of making the XML simply link to the .rss page? Are there really more than 5 people on the planet that would be interested in the actual RSS?

Why do people click the button? To get the feed's link.

Why do they want the feed? To put in their aggregator.

Now, if we know people click the button to get the link, to add to their subscribed feeds...then why doesn't our browser DO IT FOR US!!! Why can't I let Mozilla know that SharpReader is the application I read RSS feeds in, and automagically add a feed to my list of subscriptions when I click on one?

Code Whores, make this happen for me, nay, for Humanity!

Posted by danisaacs at December 10, 2004 11:04 PM | TrackBack
Comments

Hey Dan,

I believe that SharpReader supports the feed:// protocol. If you install my Firefox extension (Feed Your Reader) you can either:

1) right click on the little orange button and choose 'subscribe to this link', or
2) use the livemark autodiscovery and click on the little 'livemark icon' in the status bar and subscribe automatically.

hope you find it useful.

Posted by: Michael Koziarski on January 12, 2005 03:29 AM

The problem with Michael's suggestion is that they don't really help the end user. Think about somebody who isn't technical. He doesn't right-click. He's not going to navigate some livemark tree thingy. feed:// will fail unless his aggregator supports that scheme, which most don't. The solution is USM.

Universal Subscription Mechanism.

Look it up. It already works today.

Posted by: Randy Charles Morin on January 25, 2005 12:09 PM
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