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Mac OS X Tiger's Safari can't find my RSS feed?

Dave, I'm now running the slick new Mac OS X Tiger operating system from Apple, and amy trying to get up to speed with the RSS reader built into the new version of Safari. Very nice, but... it doesn't seem to know that my Weblogs have RSS feeds! How do I tweak my blog so Safari can see the feed and offer a one-button subscription for Tiger users?

Dave's Answer:

Great question, and now that Tiger is officially out of the bag (as it were) I can start talking about some of the really cool facets of this new operating system from Apple. I've been running Tiger for about two months now.

To accomplish what you ask is pretty straightforward and I'm surprised that your weblog application isn't already doing the right thing, actually.

Here's the secret:

Within your HEAD block in your document, you need to add an "alternate rel" link to the top of your page, between the <head> and </head> tags. For my blog it looks like this:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" 
  href="http://www.askdavetaylor.com/index.rdf" />

Not too hard! Add that line to your index template (or equivalent, depending on what blogging software you're using) and then revisit the page in Safari to see what happens.

And now that you've done that, you might be interested in learning how to build those slick Web site icons, favicons, for your blog too. I have a number of articles here on the subject, just click on favicons for more details.

Good luck.

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Comments

This phenomenon was noticeable on Firefox after the 1.0 release (in which "Live Bookmarks" were introduced). Multiple "alternate" tags can be added to the head to include Atom, RSS 2.0, comments RSS, and all the other feeds one has. Differentiate between them with title and it's all groovay.

Posted by: Apollo Lee at May 3, 2005 1:50 PM

The solution seems to be a lot simpler under Safari 2.
Just point your browser at the URL of your RSS.
That's all you need to do.

Posted by: Rod at August 20, 2007 9:55 AM

I have a lot to say, but ...

I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!