I’ve been wondering about an interesting orange icon I have seen on the right hand side of the URL display in Firefox, which seemed to always be there for WordPress sites. Thanks to Tom at TuttleSVC, I know it is now implemented in Mozilla and Microoft browsers to indicate a site has an RSS feed available.
For example, opening our (ahem) recently mentioned site for the MCLI iForum, you see it:
If you click the icon (in FireFox) you get the dialog box seen when you select to bookmark a page. This adds a Live BookMark that updates the links when the RSS feed changes, providing a handy way to follow important sites, or having your browser bookmarks act like an RSS title aggregator:
From poking around, the browser is determining if a site has a feed by looking at the LINK tags in the source HEAD, e.g.
Not earth shattering news, but now I can stop my curiosity at the orange icon.
The little icon used to be at the bottom right of the Firefox window. 1.5 moved it up to the address bar, which makes more sense to me.
Live bookmarks are pretty nice. On our OS X image, we have them predefined for different del.icio.us and Frul tag feeds so that as teachers add new content they are already bookmarked via the live bookmarks on our lab computers…