Sean's blog

Added Atom Feed to wossis.com

Feed Icon for Atom/RSS etc

It required a bit more work than I was expecting, but wossis.com now has a shiny new Atom feed for updated cardsets. Atom is a format and protocol for providing news (the ‘feed’) about a website. You may have seen the little orange ‘ping’ icon on nearly every blog or news site you’ve ever visited. That’s an Atom or RSS feed.

I’m not going to include the little icon in any of the pages at wossis.com just yet. You can make a feed available from a webpage so that a sufficiently magical browser can discover it itself, and make its presence know to you. All you need to do is to include a link element like this one (taken from wossis.com’s homepage):

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Wossis.com CardSet updates" href="/atom.xml?feed=cardset">

and your browser will let you know in its own special way that a feed is available from the site.

Feed Icon in the Firefox URL bar

Now when you click on the icon you should be offered the opportunity to ‘subscribe’. Don’t worry – Site Feeds are free (usually)! Subscribing to the feed usually means that you’ll have an easy way of keeping up to date with changes on the site you’re subscribing to. If you subscribe to the cardset updates feed from wossis.com, you’ll be able to see which are the most recently created and updated cardsets. In Firefox you get this neat popup menu:

Live Bookmark Feed menu in Firefox