Windows RSS Publisher's Guide, Part 1: Feed Auto-discovery

re: Windows RSS Publisher's Guide, Part 1

Kevin A. Burton — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 03:49:13 GMT

I have a suggestion for Microsoft publishers.

DO NOT include ugly HTML in your RSS feeds.

Did you do a view source before you posted?

Why are you insisting on changing your font sizes? It looked horrible in my aggregator!

Also. Your HTML doesn't even attempt to be well formed. Your attributes aren't even quoted.

re: Windows RSS Publisher's Guide, Part 1

rss — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 04:41:36 GMT

HTML cleaned up

- Sean

Como hacer para que IE 7 pueda descubrir los RSS

Programar.NET - Ruben D. Sanchez — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 05:59:59 GMT

He estado probando el BETA 1 de IE 7 que ofrece buenas características
que no se ofrecían anteriormente...

re: Windows RSS Publisher's Guide, Part 1

Jorgie — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 06:20:15 GMT

LOL, now make Community Server follow your rules..

It has two RSS links in the head section, one titled "RSS" and one titled "ATOM"...

So your links are breaking at least two of your own rules. Not using a descriptive titles and offering two formats for the same content. :)

Jorgie

re: Windows RSS Publisher's Guide, Part 1

Simon Mackay — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 06:25:33 GMT

Hi all!

Will the autodiscovery function be able to differentiate between content for particular feeds? What I am talking about is whether it could determine if a feed is a podcast feed, a photoblog feed, calendar feed or simply a regular feed.

If it is able to, you could have different handlers for different content types such as a screensaver for photoblogs, a "podcatcher" which places podcasts in the sync queue for your MP3 player or burns podcasts to CD or an Outlook add-on that goes through a calendar feed and adds events in the feed to your Outlook calendar.

With regards,

Simon Mackay

re: Windows RSS Publisher's Guide, Part 1

arjun banker — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 07:06:00 GMT

I think I may be missing something in the Vista IE7 bits, but is there no way to be notified when the subscribed RSS feed is updated?

re: Windows RSS Publisher's Guide, Part 1

Lanod — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 11:41:33 GMT

"DO choose good titles

As you can see in the example above, IE will display the title as you write it in your page. Therefore, it’s a good idea to actually put the title of the feed right there. A few sites we’ve seen have “RSS” as their title"

Like the IE blog discussing these features! - http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/08/02/446280.aspx

re: Windows RSS Publisher's Guide, Part 1

Jeff Parker — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 16:06:54 GMT

Questions though, how does this handle multiple feeds on a page, for example say you have several categories. You may have a feed for each of those categories and you may have a feed for everything. Does it matter how many you have there? And like here in these blogs, there is an Atom and an RSS feed, will IE Show both, I think the reason we present 2 feeds is because of different aggregators, well if IE does both they why does it matter which one a person chooses. So will IE show both feeds even though they have the exact same content in them wouldn't that just be confusing to the user wondering why the same thing is listed twice, hence more support calls to microsoft and the web developer or will IE favor one over the other or let the user choose which one to favor.

On a side note as well did you guys see per one of my suggestions on the IE blog. move the Printer button from default location because for me anyway the printer buttons was put between the 2 rss buttons. I don't know how many times while going after the rss buttons I clicked on print. Yes I went in a just removed it but I thought it was a bad location for the printer button. In older IE the print button was way off on the far side and really out of the way, I mean compaired to the number of web pages you view and the number you print the print buttons isn't that useful anyway. For me it would be maybe .00001% of the pages I view would be printed. Then they are typically not printed with the button anyway msdn has a nice print feature that prints just the article or I go up and print selected. Just a suggestion I would probably use the RSS more than the print as well.

re: Windows RSS Publisher's Guide, Part 1

rss — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 20:25:42 GMT

Yep, we know that blogs.msdn.com breaks a couple of our "rules" (which are really guidelines). :) We're working with the team to change how the server works.

But again, these are guidelines, and if a publisher wants to do something different, they are certainly entitled to.

DON’T list the same feed in different formats

Hannes Magnusson — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 21:02:47 GMT

"DON’T list the same feed in different formats

Unless you have a really good reason, it’s not a good idea to have two links (or three!) that provide the same feed in different formats. It just makes the user have to pick between two things that they are not capable of distinguishing between. Pick your favorite format, and just support that. "

view->source:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam/rss.aspx" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="ATOM" href="http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam/atom.aspx" />

Hmh?

re: Windows RSS Publisher's Guide, Part 1

Kinlan — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 20:43:18 GMT

Thats a great bit of information. I have now updated my blog to automatically be detected in IE7 which is a good thing, all I need now is for it to get converted properly :)

How do we as feed publishers make our feeds get transformed into a readable format by IE7? I seemed to have missed that piece of information.

Here are some of the links I have posted about IE. Mostly suggestions and things I have discovered about IE7 Feed support.

<a href="http://www.kinlan.co.uk/2005/08/rss-feeds-that-dont-work-in-ie7.html">Here</a>, <a href="http://www.kinlan.co.uk/2005/08/ie7-rss-feed-update-part-3-case-of.html">here</a>, <a href="http://www.kinlan.co.uk/2005/08/ie7-rss-feed-update-part-2.html">here</a>, <a href="http://www.kinlan.co.uk/2005/07/ie7-rss-feed-update.html">here</a> and <a http://www.kinlan.co.uk/2005/07/ie7-suggestions-for-rss-feeds.html">here</a>.

re: Windows RSS Publisher's Guide, Part 1

Kinlan — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 20:59:00 GMT

I also have another question.

Will IE7 (and Longhorn) support the automatic finding of Feed links buried in a page. What I mean is, I have noticed that in the anchor "a" tag in HTML can support a "type" attribute, if this contained "application/rss+xml" would IE7 be able to use that as an indicator for a feed?

I would really like it if IE7 could discover feeds I have linked to (or another developer etc) somewhere on my page.

Obviously, you couldn't list all the feeds because you could easily spam the user with thousands of links, but you could provide the first 10 maybe? A lot of people, including most of the microsoft blogs, have post categories with the associated feeds; I would like to be alerted to via the feed button.

Sorry about the double posting of the links, they came out a bit rubbish in the previous post.
http://www.kinlan.co.uk/2005/08/rss-feeds-that-dont-work-in-ie7.html
http://www.kinlan.co.uk/2005/08/ie7-rss-feed-update-part-3-case-of.html
http://www.kinlan.co.uk/2005/08/ie7-rss-feed-update-part-2.html
http://www.kinlan.co.uk/2005/07/ie7-rss-feed-update.html
http://www.kinlan.co.uk/2005/07/ie7-suggestions-for-rss-feeds.html

re: Windows RSS Publisher's Guide, Part 1

Willy Nilly — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 05:21:30 GMT

You write "DON’T list the same feed in different formats -- Unless you have a really good reason, it’s not a good idea to have two links (or three!) that provide the same feed in different formats. It just makes the user have to pick between two things that they are not capable of distinguishing between. Pick your favorite format, and just support that."

That eliminates choice and promotes dumbing down people who use Windows.

It is already standard practice for popular Web software packages (particular blog packages) to create <link> tags for one feed in multiple formats. The reason is that not everybody uses the same RSS reader, obviously. Some people prefer RDF, some prefer RSS, others perfer ATOM, and so to acknowledge that fact considerate Web packages offer uses CHOICE.

re: Windows RSS Publisher's Guide, Part 1

nechmads — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 13:07:02 GMT

Now that I know hot to publich content - I can't seem to find a way to get to the RSS Object Model in the WinFX. Is it part of Beta 1???

re: Windows RSS Publisher's Guide, Part 1: Feed Auto-discovery

John Woakes — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 03:17:13 GMT

Should the href be an absolute URL (i.e. include the http://) or can it be a relative address like /blog/rss/feed.xml?