Making the RSS icon show in the browser

Posted At : September 29, 2008 2:00 PM
Related Categories: ColdFusion,Mozilla

In Firefox (and other browsers, I assume) when you are on a site with an RSS feed, Firefox shows an orange RSS icon in the address bar like this:

Firefox RSS icon

I was trying to figure out how to get Firefox to show that icon for a site I'm working on at work. I am putting RSS into a page, and the RSS is working fine (I'm using ColdFusion's cffeed tag), but the Orange icon was not showing up in Firefox. In the past I had just assumed that Firefox discovered that the site was using RSS (using keyword searches in the page, or something) and displayed the icon accordingly. But it turns out the site developer has to put a link tag in their page header, like this:

Learn something new everyday! By the way, IE 7 doesn't display an RSS icon like Firefox does (does IE 8?).

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I fired up IE8 just to answer your question. The answer is, there's an RSS icon in the same toolbar as the options. If there's an RSS feed available, it's orange. If there's none available, it's gray. Keep in mind that the user may or may not have it hidden due to the fact that they can customize that bar (or make it smaller).

# Posted By Todd Rafferty | 9/29/08 3:34 PM

Thanks for the info Todd.

# Posted By Jake Munson | 9/29/08 4:22 PM

good random tip.

# Posted By dt | 9/29/08 5:18 PM

IE7 and IE8 both display the RSS icon in the same place, in the Command Bar to the right of the tabs :) If yours is missing then perhaps you removed it accidentally, but you can add it back by right clicking the Command Bar and choosing Customize -> Add or Remove commands...

# Posted By Justin Carter | 9/30/08 12:01 AM

Good tip, Justin. However, IE 7 doesn't appear to recognize Feeds in pages like Firefox and Safari do. I tried my new site and news.com, both of which light up the RSS icon in Firefox and Safari, but IE says "No feeds detected on this page". So basically the RSS icon in IE 7 is useless, because even if I click on it nothing happens, even though there ARE feeds available in the page. I even tried live.com/news (a Microsoft site), and the story is the same. Works in Firefox, not in IE 7. Again, I'm not sure how IE 8 works...

# Posted By Jake Munson | 9/30/08 9:02 AM

I'm looking for answeres as to why the little RSS icon shows orange in FF but not IE. Here is what I found, for what it is worth to anyone.
IE 7 (I don't know about IE8) will show the orange icon if the RSS if the <link rel= "alternate" .... tag like you have is used as long as you have it in the header portion of the page. I tried putting it in my SSI "header" page and it would show up great in FF and Safari, but not in IE7. So I tried putting the tags for the RSS feeds in both the SSI header page and on the main page. Well, I got the orange icon in both IE7 and FF, but in FF I get a duplicate list! Poop!

Ideally, I would like to have the RSS in the SSI header because it then shows access to your RSS feeds no matter what page of the site the viewer is on.... if anyone knows how to accomplish this and get the orange icon to show in IE7, I'd be most appreciative.

Well, that's my $.02 of experience on the issue. Hope it maybe helps someone else. :-)

# Posted By Kass Wagoner | 10/19/08 8:55 AM

Make sure the href attribute is an absolute URL, that might be your problem.

# Posted By Justin Carter | 10/19/08 9:14 AM

If you want Firefox to recognize your RSS Feeds when a user browses your site, add this line of HTML under your <title/> tag.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Your RSS Feed Name" href="path To your feed/rss.xml" />

# Posted By Freddie | 12/17/08 1:30 AM

Petition to the Mozilla: http://www.change.org/petitions/mozilla-corporatio...

# Posted By Stanislav GE | 3/14/12 8:34 AM

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