July 21st, 2005
Something to Try: Two types of Feed URLs
by Joshua Porter | 
5 Comments
As a sort of follow-up to my post on the interface elements for subscribing to feeds, I’ve provided two feed URLs below in order to see what various platforms do with them. One is in the regular http:// format, utilizing the http protocol, while the other one uses the feed:// pseudo-protocol.
Specifically, it would be nice to know what platforms support feed://, so we can migrate away from those instances where people click on an http:// feed and get a bunch of XML that doesn’t mean anything to them.
Also, I know you’re already subscribed to the feed, but test it out on your platform anyway, so we can see what works and what doesn’t. Note, there may be different effects depending on where you’re clicking on them. For example, the action taken when clicking within a web-based screen reader might be different than a desktop reader.
ABOUT
Bokardo is a blog about interface design for social web sites and applications. I write about recommendation systems, identity, ratings, privacy, comments, profiles, tags, reputation, sharing, as well as the social psychology underlying our motivation to use (or not use) these things. If this sounds interesting to you, grab my RSS Feed. If you want to know more about me, check out my about page.
Designing for the Social Web
Building a social web site or application? I wrote a book just for you!
Find out more or order from Peachpit or Amazon
Greatest Hits
- Five Principles to Design By
- The Del.icio.us Lesson
- Designing for the Social Web: The Usage Lifecycle
- Facebook's Brilliant but Evil Design
- Digg's Design Dilemma (Part II)
- 7 Reasons Why Web Apps Fail
- 7 More Reasons Why Web Apps Fail
- Which Movie to Watch? An Overview of Recommendation Systems
- Ugliness, Social Design, and the MySpace Lesson
Upcoming Speaking Events
- Webstock '09
Wellington, NZ / Feb 16-20, 2009
LATEST POSTS
- The Tyranny of Context
- Tripit’s innovative design evolves (but is it for the worse?)
- What if Gall’s Law were true?
- Are Designers also Marketers?
- Book Recommendation: Letting Go of the Words
- The Live Web
- Slides from Leveraging Cognitive Bias Talk
- Activity-Centered Design
- Free chapter of Designing for the Social Web available
- My Proposals for 2009 SXSW Talks
Comments ( 5 Responses so far )
1. Tobias Bergius 4:27pm, Thu 21st, 2005
Good idea. I’ve been wondering about this too.
But what if a user wants to show the XML, not to subscribe to the feed. Then we would have to use both links anyway.
Of course, you could have one “subscribe” button and one “RSS feed” link, as you have here, but I don’t know if I like that idea.
Anyway, the result:
On my Win XP box, FeedDemon gets the feed protocol link.
2. tyson 12:33am, Fri 22nd, 2005
I’m not an expert user, so I may just not know what I’m doing, but the feed protocol link didn’t work for me. On Win 98 using Firefox 1.0.6: when clicking on it I got a pop-up box saying “feed is not a registered protocol.” Bloglines does not recognize the feed when I open it in a new tab.
3. Carina 2:50pm, Sat 23rd, 2005
Firefox 1.0.6/Mac:
The feed:// link opens NetNewsWire to the New Subsciption window, with the link filled in.
The http:// link displays the feed.
4. Marcia 9:38am, Sun 24th, 2005
I’m using MAC OS X 10.3.9 and Firefox 1.0.2 and the feed link didn’t work for me. I tried clicking on the link from my Bloglines window and got a pop-up window that said that an external application must launched. When I clicked to launch, it launched Safari. Then, I received another pop-up window that said in order to open the document I would need at least MAC OS X 10.4.
Then, I opened Sage and put the feed URL into the feed search box. It opened a blank Feedster page with no content.
Hope this helps.
5. cori schlegel 4:17pm, Wed 3rd, 2005
clicked the feed link (sorry, I’m way behind on feeds) on a WinXP SPNewest laptop running Firefox 1.0.6
it opened SharpReader, my desktop reader (of choice, but only because I haven’t tried many). I clicked it within a Rojo (my preferred reader all-around) window in Firefox.
http:// did what you’d think - pushed the xml to my browser.