Ovidiu Predescu's Weblog

RSS autodiscovery

Mark Pilgrim has some thoughts on how RSS should be discovered by news aggregators, rather than explicitly being added to them. He points out to a desktop applications which does most of what he'd like. However having to run yet another desktop app to read my news is not very convenient. I would much rather have the RSS aggregated in my Weblog, perhaps in a separate area. Then how would the RSS autodiscovery work when the RSS aggregator is a Web application? They don't know what is that you're browsing, since they live on a different machine.

It would be nice if your Web browser would search for an RSS feed in each HTML page you visit, and propose you to subscribe to it. This would be annoying however for one time only pages that you visit, but if go repeatedly go back to visit the same feed, it could ask you about it. If you choose to subscribe, it could send a subscribe notification to your Weblog over HTTP/XML-RPC. I think a Mozilla extension could do it; I need to investigate some more. Of course, a nice RSS aggregator would also have to be integrated in your Weblog tool.