Friday, February 09, 2007

Feed me!!

Eminent legal blogs have predicted that RSS will explode in 2007, so who I am to argue? We have now finally added a RSS feed to my Landlord-Law site, which gives links to new items recently uploaded.

Not without a certain amount of angst from me, as I continue to find this really simple technology a bit difficult to follow sometimes. However my web-designer Gill did admit that not all of it is really simple, which gives me some comfort (although perhaps she was just being polite).

I am now using RSS feeds on my Google personalised home page which means that I can easily view and keep up with news, legal blogs, and of course the Doctor Who news page and outpost Gallifrey! I find I use it all the time now, and have five tabbed paged of links!

There is also a feed for this blog which you should find right at the bottom of the screen if you scroll down. Although if you use Mozilla Firefox, the feed icon on your toolbar should go red and you will be able to subscribe by clicking that. This doesn’t work with the Landlord-Law feed though - I have no idea why not, another one of the 'really confusing' things about this 'really simple' system.

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1 comment:

Nick Holmes said...

Tessa

I think you'll appreciate that the "really simple" tag refers to the simplicity of the standard format rather than its applications. RSS feeds are of course also now really simple to read (with web readers such as Google and with Firefox/IE7 support). They are also really simple to create if you use a CMS that supports this (most notably blog software). Otherwise you have to RYO, so this is still for the technically competent.

So far as "autodiscovery" by Firefox and IE7 is concerned, this is a bit of a misnomer. You need to include link element(s) in the head element of your pages to tell applications about the related feed(s). For the Landlord-Law feed the relevant link element would be as follows
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Landlord-Law Latest Additions" href="http://www.landlordlaw.co.uk/rss" />

Nick