23/05/2024

Feed and Blogrolls Discovery

I recently stumbled upon a really nice blogpost about adding blogrolls to your website. That post led me to another post with specs for blogrolls, which by the way are just OPML files.

I love OPML and outliners. I think they're an underrated format and workflow.

Based on those two posts, I added a blogroll <link> to this site. Now, my <head> section has RSS, Atom, and Blogroll links in it. Feels super nice to offer such files.

That got me thinking that I had no idea which sites were offering such things, so those of you that know me know what I did next, I created a WebExtension to display a page action when it detects RSS, Atom, or Blogroll on the site you're reading.

Animation showing the page action. It shows a workflow where the feed open in a native feed reader.
Animation showing the page action. It shows a workflow where the feed open in a native feed reader.

The page action popup lets the user open or copy the link to the feeds and blogroll. If attempting to open a feed link, the add-on will change the protocol to feed: because that seems to be what most native and web readers are using to intercept RSS/Atom feed links. If copying then the original protocol is preserved.

The add-on has been published to Firefox Add-ons. The source code lives here (MIT License, no build system, badly written JS but it works).

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