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The little rss icon - what makes it glow?

About once or twice a day, we get an email from someone asking why it is that IE 7 isn't detecting an RSS feed on a particular page that clearly has a feed associated with it.

Usually, this means that there's an RSS or XML button somewhere on the page. The user can visually tell that there's a feed, so why can't IE?

Well, feed auto-discovery works in a very simple way. Instead of trying guess the intent of the publisher and trying to figure out whether there's an little orange (or blue, or burnt sienna, for that matter) icon, IE will look for a specific "link" element in the HTML of the page that needs to be added by the publisher. We have published a short guide to what we're looking for here: https://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam/articles/PublishersGuide.aspx.

So, if a page doesn't have that "link" element, then IE7 won't detect the feed. Most sites that have RSS or Atom support include this element, but some haven't gotten around to it yet. So, if you find one, be sure to send them the link to the guide above.

Alternatively, if a site does have all the right information, please add the site to our feedback wiki, and we'll investigate it.

Thanks,
Sean

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 10, 2006
    I think it would be really helpful if you were to change the color of the RSS discovery icon to green if a user has already added the site's primary feed to their Feeds...

    Thanks
  • Anonymous
    February 10, 2006
    No, it is still not working... :(
  • Anonymous
    February 10, 2006
  1. I would like to be able to refresh all feeds in the "feeds list" rather than to have to right click on each one and select refresh to see if there is new items.

    2. Don't you have a way to check if that I only read one new blog item in a bloc, and then unhighlight that item? Pluck keeps track of this. Right now if I read one item then all items are unhighlighted (of course, I would still like the option of saying all items have been looked at).

    3. What is the of the "show all"? Italways seems to be on.

  • Anonymous
    February 10, 2006
    Julian can you give a link to what's not working?

  • Anonymous
    February 10, 2006
    You may want to think about implementing something like numbers 1 - 6 of http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/08/15/ultraliberal_rss_locator

  • Anonymous
    February 10, 2006
    Please examine the link for the publisher's guidelines - you're specifying a relative URL instead of a fully qualified path.  This means that users reading this post in a news reader can't click on the link.

  • Anonymous
    February 10, 2006
    There is a bug with the glowing icon.

    If I have two tabs open (this IE blog) and a blank page. Close tab with IE blog switch to blank it is orange do a refresh orange disappears (so far.. so good). BUT now open another blank page. The orange tab is glowing again. Go back to the previous blank page. orange tab is glowing again. ??

  • Anonymous
    February 10, 2006
    Your doing it again MS!!!

    Why would we want to add an specific piece of code to our page just for ie?

    Just let it pick up RSS the same way firefox does. Problems and confusion solved!

  • Anonymous
    February 10, 2006
    Ian: Firefox does exactly what is described here, it looks if there is such a link element in the page and pick it from there.

  • Anonymous
    February 10, 2006
    just wondering if there's a master setting to set the refresh time on the rss feeds. Right now I individually need to go into everyone and change from a day to hour or whatever choose.

  • Anonymous
    February 10, 2006
    I have not figured out how to manually refresh all the channels without having to select each one.  I typically get on my laptop in the morning and evening and want to refresh all at once with one click of the button.

  • Anonymous
    February 10, 2006
    The discovery feature does not work when the page is loaded in a frame. If the same page is loaed without the frames it will see the <link..> and make the icon glow.

  • Anonymous
    February 10, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 10, 2006
    I found this icon often glows without any reason. Especially it glows during the page loading and stops when loading is finnished. And sometimes doesn't.

  • Anonymous
    February 10, 2006
    Well, Mark Pilgrim (a well-respected individual in the 'feed industry') suggested steps that should be taken by feed aggregators to improve the usability of feed-finding: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/08/15/ultraliberal_rss_locator

    The Ultra-Liberal Feed Finder (Python; http://diveintomark.org/projects/feed_finder/) does this, and so does SimplePie (PHP; http://simplepie.org), and those are written in web languages.

    Surely Microsoft could add this kind of usability to their own feed reader...

  • Anonymous
    February 10, 2006
    in my case with the Beta 2 Preview, I can't use the rss feeds 'cause when I open leftside bar of favorites and go to feeds, IE7 crash... I don't know if it's my OS language or code, or what.

    My OS is Windows XP SP2 Spanish Language

  • Anonymous
    February 10, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 10, 2006
    Interestingly, the article suggests that listing the same feed in multiple formats is a serious DON'T, but when you check the page it provides the blog in RSS and ATOM format right there.

    Same for any IE Team blog page (seems to be a feature of your blogging software).

    Always best to follow your own "best practices" or you are likely to look foolish.

  • Anonymous
    February 10, 2006
    It would be nice if when I'm viewing an RSS feed after clicking the orange icon, I could click the orange icon again to return to the page I came from. The back button's a long way away...

  • Anonymous
    February 11, 2006
    I second the problem mentioned by {o} (Friday, February 10, 2006 6:20 PM) here. For me, each and every page that is loading makes the orange icon glow, and stops glowing as soon as the page has finished loading

  • Anonymous
    February 11, 2006
    For feeds that have been updated you add "(new)" after the RSS feed text of the particular link in the dropdown menu. I would like instead of using "(new)" to just make the updated RSS feeds BOLD. (just the way it is in the favorites center)

  • Anonymous
    February 11, 2006
    everytime when I go to the weather channel www.weather.com when I use the feed for this site I got this message:

    Internet Explorer cannot display this feed
    An unknown error has occurred.
    Please try again later.

    Back to previous page


    More Information

  • Anonymous
    February 13, 2006
    href="/rssteam/articles/PublishersGuide.aspx"

    relative urls...bad boys ;)

  • Anonymous
    February 13, 2006
    Is there a way to chage the style sheet that is used to display a feed?

  • Anonymous
    February 13, 2006
    What about the possibility to add RSS Feed List on Link Toolbar like Firefox?

    Look IE7: http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/2042/ie7norsslink0qm.png
    and Look Firefox: http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/673/firefoxrsslink4dx.png

  • Anonymous
    February 13, 2006
    No,
    I don't like that cause it's difficult to scroll through.

  • Anonymous
    February 13, 2006
    MasterofDisaster,

    I've fixed that now.

    - Al Billings [MSFT]

  • Anonymous
    February 14, 2006
    [quote]I don't like that cause it's difficult to scroll through.[/quote]

    are you serious?

  • Anonymous
    February 15, 2006
    [quote]are you serious?[/quote]

    YEP!

  • Anonymous
    February 18, 2006
    There is a way to refresh all the feeds in IE!!
    Just go to Control Panel > Scheduled Tasks > System_Feed_Sync_Scheduler.job  right click it, and choose Run! That's it!

  • Anonymous
    February 18, 2006
    For some reason, the display (RSS Feed) of RedState.org is never updated. The website feed is getting updated but not the page. Any ideas?

  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2006
    I have a very simple post on RSS and the simple 2 click subscription process with some screen shots that your readers might find valuable. You can view the blog post here: http://blog.leveragedpromotion.com/item/116664

    Great work on a very easy to grasp implementation for RSS subscription. This is going to bring RSS content into the mainstream. Finally !

    The autodiscovery tag is a funny thing. No one ever quite understands what it is or how it works. ;)

    Rodney Rumford
    Founder: Podblaze.com

  • Anonymous
    February 22, 2006
    I have added a few feeds. But they are not updating. What might be wrong. I probably read somewhere that feeds don't update when ie7 is running. If that is true, the design should be changed to update feeds irrespective of whether ie7 is running or not, because people like me do keep their browser running 24x7. also when new content is available, there should be visual indication, like, say, the favorites center button glowing.

  • Anonymous
    February 23, 2006
    Hey,

    Funny enough MSDN's own feeds do NOT auto discover in Vista Feb. CPT. :(

    That is:

    http://msdn1.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx

    lol

    cya,

    Will

  • Anonymous
    February 23, 2006
    The rss icon is behaving very badly. If in one tab a page with a feed is viewed and then we move to another tab, the icon is perenially on, even if the page and subsequent pages visited on any tab don't have any feed.

  • Anonymous
    March 29, 2006
    PingBack from https://jcrue.wordpress.com/2006/03/29/i-cannot-recommend-ie-7-beta-2-to-anyone/

  • Anonymous
    March 15, 2008
    PingBack from http://blogrssblog.info/ieblog-the-little-rss-icon-what-makes-it-glow/

  • Anonymous
    May 29, 2009
    PingBack from http://paidsurveyshub.info/story.php?title=ieblog-the-little-rss-icon-what-makes-it-glow