Tip: RSS Address Bar Icons

Thursday, July 16, 2009

EditMe sites have included an RSS feeds for a long time now, and a couple of ago EditMe's RSS capabilities were given a significant boost in power and flexibility. But up until now, the "autodiscovery" icon that makes a site's RSS feeds available in the browser's address bar have been absent. The reason for this delay warrants some explanation...

Customers use EditMe in many different ways. Some use their EditMe site as a collaboration wiki. Some use it as their public small business web site. Some use it for private sites limited to select individuals. The many ways EditMe's security and design capabilities can be put to use make wholesale changes to the product tricky sometimes, as was the case for RSS Autodiscovery.

The orange RSS autodiscovery icon showed in address bar of Firefox

Customers who use EditMe as a wiki like the Recent Changes RSS feed - it tells their RSS reader of choice whenever changes are made to the site, what was changed, and who changed it. To our wiki customers, this is an obvious plus.

On the other hand, customers who use EditMe to host their company's public marketing web site do not want an RSS feed of the changes they've made available to every visitor. Instead, they might want to promote the RSS feed to their blog, as is done on this site.

Yorktown Skins Now Include RSS Autodiscovery

As of this posting, the Yorktown skins will now display the RSS icon in the address bar of supporting browsers if your site is configured to show the tools menu to all users. The Yorktown skins include a setting that allows administrators to hide the Tools menu at the top for sites that are not intended to invite collaboration. If the tools menu is turned off for anonymous users, the Autodiscovery icon will not be shown.

You will need to re-apply your site's Yorktown skin to gain this new feature. Alternatively, follow the instructions below to add it yourself.

Displaying Custom Autodiscovery Icons

If your site uses a non-Yorktown skin or if you want to display additional or alternative feeds, you can do so by adding a simple tag to your Layout. Here's how:

1. Determine the RSS link you want to publish

First use the documentation at http://wiki.editme.com/RSS to determine the URL of the RSS feed you want to make available in the address bar of browsers displaying your site. Copy this URL to the clipboard.

2. Construct the LINK tag

Browser's display an Autodiscovery icon for each LINK tag in the site's HTML header that is formatted as follows:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Recent Changes" href="http://demo.editme.com/rss.xml" />

You'll notices that the "href" value in this tag is the RSS feed for EditMe's Demo site. You'll want to replace that with the URL you created in the previous step.

The "title" value should describe the feed. Different browsers may or may not display this title. For example, Firefox will only show it if there are multiple feeds available. Yes - you can provide as many RSS feeds as you like.

3. Drop the LINK tag(s) into your Layout

Go to Settings -> Look & Feel -> Layouts and edit your site's current default layout. Scroll down and find the <HEAD> tag. Just after it, paste in your LINK tags and save. That's it!