Holizz versus the Web

Looks like Neil was a little ahead of the game when he adopted the Firefox feed icon because Microsoft has had a little chat with Mozilla and also adopted the Firefox feed icon (via Asa). I might adopt the icon myself when I get around to styling my site (don’t hold your breath).

This is what I like to see: cooperation between browser vendors to make things easier for users.

Hopefully now that there’s a consensus (at least between Mozilla and Microsoft) people will stop using those stupid orange RSS and XML icons.

I must say I’m quite looking forward to IE 7. I do hope it lives up to the hype and, most importantly, supports much more of CSS 2 (and fixes their CSS parser bugs).

RFC 4287, also known as The Atom Syndication Format, has been published!

See also Anne’s post and Tim’s post.

• I fixed my comments feed today. Turns out there was already a patch for it in the bugreport. Although the attachment there has a bug, for which I have a patch.
• Yahoo has a Geek Statue, because apparently they beat Gmail/Google Mail. I’ve tried to log into Yahoo mail several times; each time it tells me my session has expired (on the UK version it puts me into an infinate redirect loop). And yes, I’m accepting cookies indescriminately. So no, Yahoo haven’t beaten Google in mail for the simple fact that Google Mail works and Yahoo Mail doesn’t. (Attempting to reregister = fill out the form, submit, arrive at the same form emptied of all values with no explanation). The help system doesn’t seem to be of any help, either.
• I haven’t been swimming for a week now. It’s working out well. I have more energy to spend on other exercise and learning Japanese because I don’t start my day by exercising before I eat. Lately I’ve been exercising my legs. Mostly stretching and kicking. I’ve touched each of my big toes with each leg stretched, but I’m yet to touch them at the same time. That’s taken me much closer to my goal in just a few days. I can also kick at about head height.
• I got some kanji flashcards from eBay the other day. They’re quite good. Already I’m understanding the relation between the いち、に、さん counting system and the ひとつ、ふたつ、みっつ counting system. The days of the week seem a little less arbitrary in kanji too.

Google Reader was announced today.

It’s rather cool. There’s a preview feature, which I’ve found missing in other feed readers I’ve tried. Here’s a preview of my feed (must be signed into your Google account for it to work). You can see all my latest entries, and there’s a big, fat Subscribe button at the top. You will notice, if you’re paying attention, that it supports Atom 1.0.

I’m happy with the lack of technical terms, and the way the subscription is handled. You’re not expected to find a feed URI and put it in manually. All you do is search and subscribe.

How do you subscribe to a feed when you’re already at a website and you can’t be bothered to go to Reader and search for the feed? Get a bookmarklet to do it: → Reader (Yay! My first bookmarklet!). It finds the author’s preferred feed and takes you to the preview page where you can subscribe. It only has one real bug; it takes you to a blank page with a cryptic message if there are no feeds listed on a Web page.

Update: I’ve found several other bookmarklets since I first posted this:

• GodsMoon’s improvement upon my bookmarklet—fixes a few things broken with mine, and supports Xanga
• A bookmarklet from Fumiaki Yoshimatsu—subscribes to main feed like mine, but also checks the mime type
• A slightly more dynamic one by Jim Rutherford—pops up a pane to select between feeds if more than one

After a small amount of hacking, I now have fully-valid Atom 1.1 feeds for entries (thanks to comatoast’s patch, although I patched it further because the <id>s were silly) and comments (thanks to this Atom 0.3 comments feed thing). They’re both valid: entries, comments.

Here are the relevant files I now have in my 1.5.2 installation:

• wp-feed.php
• wp-atom.php
• wp-commentsatom.php

There is also an RSS entries feed for legacy software.

Tip for those using the Universal Feed Parser: there’s a patch for Atom 1.0 support (that’s how I got Straw to be happy).

Heh heh heh. Atom 1.1 exists only in my imagination. Did I mention I implemented the <unicorn> element in my feed?