5.8.12

Red Sweater Blog – Subscribe To Feed Safari Extension

Red Sweater Blog – Subscribe To Feed Safari Extension


Subscribe To Feed Safari Extension

July 25th, 2012
Now that Safari 6 is available as part of Mountain Lion 10.8, and as a software update for Lion, I can finally explain the rumblings I made months ago about an extension facilitating feed subscription directly from Safari.
The motivation behind my foray into Safari extension development was my early adoption of Safari 6 during the beta phase. I noticed they had removed the long-standing, built-in “RSS” button near the URL bar. This button makes it easy to subscribe to an RSS or Atom feed for a blog, or any other site that offers such a feed.
I’m disappointed by Apple’s decision to remove the button, but when life hands you lemons …
My beta-quality, more-or-less unsupported Subscribe to Feed extension adds a handy button to the toolbar that, when a page offers RSS or Atom feeds, can be clicked to easily open the feed:// link, which should automatically open your favorite news reader.
I hope this extension fills a void for those of you missing the beloved RSS button from Safari 5 and earlier.
Updates:
  • Since I posted this on Wednesday (the day Mountain Lion 10.8 was released), the response has been overwhelming. I didn’t realize there would be so much interest in restoring the functionality of the Safari RSS button.
    The interest has been so strong that more than a couple people have installed the extension apparently unaware of its purpose. The gist of the extension is to make it easy to subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds in an external application, separate from Safari. For example, it will open inNetNewsWireReeder or any other application on your Mac that claims to support “feed:” style URLs.
    Some folks who are just getting in to desktop RSS readers are discovering they don’t have a “default app” setting on their Mac, and Apple no longer provides a simple UI inside Safari for setting the default. The best solution I know for this issue is to download and use the venerable RCDefaultApp to set a default RSS reader for your Mac.
  • A number of users who use Google Reader through the browser would like it if there were a way for this extension to automatically subscribe in Google Reader instead of through a Mac client. I’m not sure exactly how this would work but I bet it’s possible with a preference in the extension that would offer the ability to open a Google Reader URL for subscribing. This is a little ambitious though, so if you want this feature and happen to be able to code Safari/JavaScript solutions, please send me a proof of concept for subscribing to Google Reader from JavaScript on a web page, and I’ll see if I can integrate it into the extension.
  • On August 2, 2012, I released Subscribe to Feed 1.0b4, addressing a number of issues from the initial release.

Subscribe To Feed 1.0b4

August 2nd, 2012
OK, I know I said I wasn’t particularly going to be supporting the Subscribe to Feed Safari extension I released last week, but it so happens I got a lot of great feedback and even some anonymous code contributions to help beef up the behavior of the plugin.
If you already have 1.0b3 or later installed, you can just check for updates in Safari’s extension preferences. Otherwise, download directly by clicking the name below:
  • New toolbar icon with Retina display support
  • Support for multiple feeds on a page, selectable from a popup menu
  • Convert from http:// to feed:// for faster, streamlined subscription process
  • Expand the list of MIME types recognized as valid feeds to cover edge cases
Hope you enjoy these fixes and enhancements. Let me know if there are other glaringly missing features or bugs.

6 Responses to “Subscribe To Feed 1.0b4”

  1. Matt B Says:
    Awesome thanks for the update!
  2. Richard Z. Says:
    Thank you for building, and maintaining this extension. I really appreciate it.
  3. Eric Says:
    Thank you so much!
  4. Corentin Cras-Méneur Says:
    Thanks a million for this very useful extension. Nice improvement over the previous version.
    Much appreciated!
  5. Linda Cullen Says:
    Help…..when I hit the subscribe to feed button, I get an error message in mail that states: Error: No associated application could be found. How do I tell the plug-in were to open?
  6. linkedin hunter reviews Says:
    Pretty portion of content. I just stumbled upon your blog and in accession capital to say that I get actually loved account your blog posts. Any way I will be subscribing to your augment or even I fulfillment you access constantly fast.