Scott Hanselman

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Getting the little RSS Orange Badge to show up in the Status Bar on Firefox 1.0

September 15, 2004 Comment on this post [5] Posted in ASP.NET | DasBlog | XML
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I run dasBlog as you likely have noticed.  I also am a FireFox fan fo rmy personal browser, and there's a nice new RSS feature in FireFox 1.0PR.  It shows the RSS Orange badge in the status bar, and when you click on it, you can subscribe to a "smart bookmark" that will appear as a folder with each RSS item as an item.  Very slick, and makes RSS reading easy for someone like my Mom.

Additionally it's nice for a browser to FIND the RSS/Atom feed rather than hunting for the badge on the web page.

The way you let Mozilla know about these features is with the <link> tag like this. I added these lines to my dasBlog homeTemplate.blogtemplate file.  You should too. 

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://...">
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom" href="http://...">

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Comment on this post [5]
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September 15, 2004 12:10
Strange. On my machine Firefox 1.0PR does not show this orange RSS badge, but an icon looking like a certificate. However, it shows the same menu as yours.
Thomas Freudenberg
September 15, 2004 13:56
Despite having a valid RSS feed (at least according to http://feedvalidator.org/ ) Firebird/fox/whatever it is today just tells me "Live bookmark failed to load". And I'll be damned if I can work out how to get more information out of it.
Barry Dorrans
September 15, 2004 17:14
Hopefully web devs will start taking advantage of this feature. The key is that you need to indicate that it is an RSS (and/or atom? I don't know) feed. The tag you used works, as does .Text's method of naming the page (rss.aspx). There are too many sites that have dynamically produced feeds with nothing to indicate that they are feeds.
Shannon J Hager
September 15, 2004 23:33
This is nice, but it doesn't yet track what you've read (and I read a LOT of feeds. Without that, I would definatly end up re-reading a decent amount of content. You might want to check out this extension: http://sage.mozdev.org/
Bogo
September 16, 2004 0:56
The simplicity of the integration to the browser is nice. For example, you can drag a post's bookmark under your feed (live bookmark) to wherever you would like to keep a permanent bookmark to the post. It doesn't remove it from you feed, but makes a copy of it. Bingo, you have a news bin like functionality that comes in most aggregators. However, it is no different than your other bookmarks nor is it stored in a separate application or plugin.

It will likely not replace my current aggregator since it lacks some functionality, but I'm giving it time to see how it changes my feed reading usage patterns.
James Arendt

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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.