Firefox Integrates RSS

The new preview release of Firefox contains several new notable features, my favorite being the RSS bookmarklet integration dubbed “Live Bookmarks”. If you’re not familiar with RSS (Really Simple Syndication), it is a way to produce live content feeds for your website for use with news aggregators and other content management software. RSS is simply a derivative of XML, that all encompassing semantic markup language you’ve probably heard about before. It allows people to “subscribe” to your content, giving them a live update of your feed as soon as it is available. The RSS format is finally settling in as the de facto syndication standard for the web and there is no bigger sign of this than its integration into Firefox.

If you have downloaded the new Firefox, you may have noticed a little RSS icon light up on the bottom of your screen when you come to a site with syndicated content.

Clicking on this RSS button allows you to put the live feed into your bookmarks, effectively making Firefox a spiffy news aggregator. The bookmarks are live in the sense that they update as content is released, giving you a real-time view of your favorite news sources.

Firefox will not detect your RSS feed automatically though. Simply having an RSS link on your page is not enough. You must explicitly define the location and version of the RSS feed in a meta tag within the head of your HTML document like so:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://www.solanosystems.com/wordpress/wp-rss2.php" /></link>

Where the type attribute is dependent upon the actual RSS format used. RSS .92 should be delivered with type “text/xml” and the popular atom format should be delivered with type “application/atom+xml”. Obviously, the href attribute should contain a link to your feed.

Another note: it appears as if the Live Bookmark feature in Firefox will only load properly if your RSS feed contains link and title elements for each item. Link and title entries are not required per the RSS 2.0 specifications; thus, not all feeds will work in Firefox.

Time to go check on those defrosting hamburgers.