In our latest release, we’ve made some changes to the RSS feeds that are available from Windows Live. We made RSS feeds for various types of content easier to find, we removed some extra elements in the XML code of our feeds, and we made other changes to ensure that, as more people start using our RSS feeds, we will be able to support all of the additional activity. I’ll talk about each of these below and as usual, we would love to hear your feedback in the comments.

Easier to find

Whether you use RSS feeds avidly or just casually, you’re likely aware of the small icon in web browsers that lights up when an RSS feed is available on a webpage.

Internet Explorer:

Firefox:

Opera:

 

On the main page of your space, the RSS feed icon has been lit up for a long time, but now, specialized RSS feeds are also available for individual blog entries, for blog entries from a particular category, or for lists.

Check out these pages that have associated RSS feeds:

* We found a bug where some category feeds don’t work right now. We’re working on a fix.

Removing some extra elements

If you’ve ever looked at the XML in one of our RSS feeds, you may have noticed a bunch of standard elements like <title>, <link>, and <description>, plus some extra elements like <msn:type>. After years of retaining these “extra” elements, which originated with RSS feeds on MSN Spaces, we’ve finally removed a few of them. This has helped to get our RSS feeds closer to fully validating, and allows them to load a little bit faster.

We realize that any code change like this has the potential to cause some issues. Specifically, we’re aware that it has caused problems with some digital photo frames set up to read our RSS feeds, and we’re working on a fix for that.

Preparing for more RSS use

We’ve started to see that more and more of our customers want to be able to take the stuff they share on Windows Live to other social aggregation services like FriendFeed, Plaxo, or others. One of the easiest ways to do this is to enter your RSS feed into one of these services.

To prepare for more people (or services) using RSS, we’ve made some changes to our RSS infrastructure. This included changing the URLs for all RSS feeds – there’s more about this change in the next section. We’ve also put redirects in place, so any RSS readers that were pointing to old URLs will continue to work. We expect to keep these redirects around for a very long time; just like we still have redirects in place for http://spaces.live.com/robdolin.

We’re aware that the URL change caused some RSS readers to revert all RSS items to “unread.” On behalf of the team, I want to apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

RSS and programmability

If you’re interested in some of the technical details about how URLs for RSS feeds work, I’ll try to explain. The feed at http://robdolin.spaces.live.com/blog/feed.rss is now hosted at: http://cid-3c8ca60f8f925fec.users.api.live.net/Users(4363044724778622956)/Blogs(‘3C8CA60F8F925FEC!106’)/Entries?$format=rss20 . As you likely noticed, there are a bunch of numbers and letters in the URL to my blog feed. There’s actually a bit of method to what might look like a random jumble.

For example, the URL for my profile is: http://cid-3c8ca60f8f925fec.profile.live.com/. The letters and numbers “3c8ca60f8f925fec” are something our team refers to as a HexCID or a Hexadecimal Customer ID. If you ever studied this in math class, you may remember that you can represent a number in base 16 or hexadecimal. If you convert this number to decimal (base 10), it’s 4363044724778622956. And interestingly, the URL to my blog RSS is: http://cid-3c8ca60f8f925fec.users.api.live.net/Users(4363044724778622956)/Blogs(‘3C8CA60F8F925FEC!106’)/Entries?$format=rss20 or

http://cid-{HexCID&#125;.users.api.live.com/Users({DecCID})/Blogs(‘{blogID}’)/Entries?$Format=rss20

If you’re interested in learning more about this area (it’s pretty geeky ) please leave a comment. If I get enough responses, I may post more on this topic later.

A note about privacy

The RSS feeds described above are only for content that you choose to share publicly. If you don’t want RSS feeds to be available from your blogs or lists, go to the General options page of your space (http://<your_id&gt;.spaces.live.com/Options/General/) and clear the Syndicate this space check box. Also, if your space is not publicly shared, RSS feeds aren’t available.

Thanks very much for taking the time to read about the RSS feed updates for Windows Live. As usual, if you have feedback or questions about this topic, please leave a comment.

– Rob Dolin
Program Manager, Windows Live social networking team

Clubhouse Tags: clubhouse, story, Profile, Spaces, RSS

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