Subscribe To Feed 1.0b4
August 2nd, 2012OK, 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.
August 2nd, 2012 at 7:20 pm
Awesome thanks for the update!
August 2nd, 2012 at 8:15 pm
Thank you for building, and maintaining this extension. I really appreciate it.
August 3rd, 2012 at 12:57 pm
Thank you so much!
August 3rd, 2012 at 2:44 pm
Thanks a million for this very useful extension. Nice improvement over the previous version.
Much appreciated!
August 4th, 2012 at 9:07 am
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?
August 4th, 2012 at 1:32 pm
Hi Linda – see the comments in the post about “RCDefaultApp”. You have to have a dedicated RSS client on your Mac to take advantage of the extension. Mail used to handle RSS in 10.7 but they took that feature out, hence the error message you’re seeing.
August 5th, 2012 at 1:51 am
I hit the tool bar button and up come my reader RSSOwl. But . . but .. nothing else. The feed is not read my the reader. I am missing a link in there somewhere.
Any suggestion?
August 5th, 2012 at 8:56 am
Hi Norm – If it is coming up in RSSOwl but nothing else happens, it’s probably an issue in RSSOwl in particular. Maybe it’s not designed to properly handle feed: URLs, but the system thinks it is, for some reason. If you manually type a feed URL into Safari’s address bar, e.g.:
feed://www.red-sweater.com/blog/feed/
Does it exhibit the same problem (opens RSSOwl but nothing happens)? This would indicate a general problem with opening feed URLs that is not specifically related to my extension.
August 5th, 2012 at 6:35 pm
Yeah, I am pretty sure it’s a RSSOwl problem . . I left a message over at their support forum.
Thanks.
August 8th, 2012 at 8:25 pm
10b4 does not work in Safari 6 under 10.7.4 – or I am doing something wrong. Extensions are ON and the extension is installed and I can see the RSS icon in the Safari toolbar.
However, if I try to load a feed, like: feed://www.red-sweater.com/blog/feed/
Mail launches – I do not see the feed in Safari. What am I doing wrong? Thanks.
August 9th, 2012 at 12:03 am
EP: sorry the post was not more clear about this, but the extension does not add RSS reading functionality to Safari. It merely replicates the old behavior of Safari that the RSS button would open the feed in *your default RSS Reader*. If that default reader was Safari or Mail, it’s not going to work. These applications no longer support reading RSS. You need to download a desktop RSS app and configure it as the default news app on your Mac in order for the extension to work meaningfully.
August 14th, 2012 at 11:23 am
This is an odd edge-case problem. With Subscribe to Feed enabled, I encounter a problem at metafilter.com when using that site’s built-in Javascript-based shortcuts for creating links in posts or comments.
Metafilter’s posting textfield has a few buttons below it for applying bold/italic/anchor tags to selected text. There are also keyboard equivalents–control B/I/U. If I invoke the “create anchor tag” function through the keyboard shortcut and type a URL into the resulting dialog box, Safari crashes after I hit return on that dialog box. If I invoke this same function by clicking on the button, nothing bad happens. Really weird.
August 14th, 2012 at 1:23 pm
Adam – thanks for the report. I am writing myself a bug report to look into this more carefully when I get a chance.
August 14th, 2012 at 5:03 pm
Hi: I am trying to get a handle on this now that I have to add a third party RSS reader. I’m a little confused. After I download your Feed Reader, is it necessary to download the RCDefaultApp? I read the page and still don’t understand what it does. Does it make the 1.0b4 extension work better?
Thanks.
Rita
August 14th, 2012 at 7:17 pm
Oops, I meant Feed extension. Not feed reader.
Rita
August 14th, 2012 at 8:38 pm
Hi Rita- what the RCDefaultApp does is help fill the missing functionality in 10.8 of selecting a “default feed reader.” Without it, it’s impossible to set the default reader unless the downloaded 3rd party RSS app of your choice offers to do it for you.
If there is no “default feed reader” configured for your Mac, then the extension will not be able to open the feeds in any meaningful way.
August 15th, 2012 at 12:47 am
Thanks, Daniel. One more question. If I only have one RSS reader, would that be the default reader so that I would not need to download the RCDefaultApp ?
August 15th, 2012 at 10:21 am
Rita: unfortunately, no. Because in particular Apple’s Mail app used to support RSS, it’s likely that unless you just installed 10.8 from scratch, your computer still has a residual default setting for Mail to handle these feeds.
August 15th, 2012 at 12:36 pm
Okay. Thanks very much. I appreciate your explanation. Very clear.
Rita