[syndication] Re: locating syndication feeds

[Morbus Iff <morbus@disobey.com>]

>The future is in bookmarklets. They work for client-side
>software as well as server-side. You just write a little
>bookmarklet that redirects you (or opens a new window) to a "Add
>this feed" page passed with the URL of the page the user was
>previously looking at. The "add this feed" page can easily scan
>the site for a rel attribute.

Aaron,

I tried something very similar to this today, and didn't have much luck,
actually. I started with the Blogger bookmarklet (which opens a small
window with the current pages title/link prefilled), and modified
AmphetaDesk.

This is what I came up with:

 javascript:Q='';if(top.frames.length==0)Q=document.selection.createRange().t
 ext;void(btw=window.open('http://127.0.0.1:8888/add_a_channel.html?unknown_u
 rl='+escape(location.href),'add_a_channel','scrollbars=no,width=475,height=300
 ,left=75,top=175,status=yes'));btw.focus();

Now, this works perfectly for HTML pages and properly opens up AmphetaDesk.
With  10 seconds of time, it's also changeable to Headline Viewer too. But
this is the problem:

   It *only* works on HTML pages.

If I click on an XML link and then click the bookmarklet it fails
miserably, and after some thoughthinking, I'm guessing it's because
browsers don't give XML a DOM that the JS "location.href" can work with. Am
I on the mark?

In this example, I was trying to create a bookmarklet that would work with
no changes to existing sites. It'd be no effort to add a rel scanner to
various reader programs, but it still requires webmasters to include the
code.

As a program writer, I'd feel skittish about giving the "dumb users" the
idea of a feature that would mysteriously be supported on some sites, and
ignored on other sites. They'll blame it on the software, not the site.

Anyone have any ideas on modding the above javascript to work?

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