Category LiveBookmarks Plugin

Updated June 9, 2020 • 14 comments

Category LiveBookmarks Icon
CLB+ Enthusiastic Firefox users enjoy the luxury of Live Bookmarks, a feature of Firefox that automatically discovers and updates RSS feeds. Web pages with available feeds are indicated by the orange feed icon located in the browser’s address bar.

Clicking the feed icon presents a list of all available feeds for that particular webpage. Users then select which feeds they would like Firefox to bookmark, track, and automatically update. Makes subscribing stupid easy. Very handy indeed.

Note: This article explains the underlying technology for this plugin. If you already are familiar with Firefox Live Bookmarks and WordPress feeds, you can skip the following discussion and download the free WordPress plugin »

Manual method

Providing Live Bookmark feeds to your readers is as easy as adding “link” tags for each feed to the head section of each webpage. Then, simply set the “type” attribute to application/atom+xml or application/rss+xml, and away you go. Not so bad, but a bit tedious, perhaps.

WordPress users typically transmit RSS feeds for both comments and posts, and frequently provide individual category feeds. Further, each feeds may be provided via a variety of formats, including RSS 0.92, RSS 2.0, and Atom. Manually adding the feed links to the header.php file works if you don’t care about context sensitivity, because the same links would appear for all pages, whether the feeds were actually available from there or not. Fortunately, there is a more sophisticated method for managing your Live Bookmark feeds…

WordPress plugin

Introducing Category LiveBookmarks (CLB), a WordPress plugin designed to simplify the process of adding complete Live Bookmark functionality to your website. Category LiveBookmarks seamlessly generates “Live-Bookmark” feed links for each of your WordPress blog categories. It will generate feed links for all categories on your main blog page, and only relevant feeds on single-post-view pages. Also, CLB automatically omits feeds with zero posts, and excludes subcategory feeds. CLB is designed for Firefox’s Live Bookmarks and Opera’s Livemarks. Generates strictly valid XHTML markup. Tested and verified with WordPress 2.0+. Should work with WP 1.5+ as well (no guarantees).

This plugin has been adapted from ArunRocks plugin, Livemarks. Many important modifications have been made to the original, such as are summarized here. To download the plugin, visit the CLB+ homepage.

Installation and Usage

Unzip file, add to wp-content/plugins directory, upload, activate, and enjoy! There are also two options within the PHP file itself that you will probably want to customize: Comment feed links and blog title.

About the Author

Jeff Starr = Web Developer. Security Specialist. WordPress Buff.

14 responses to “Category LiveBookmarks Plugin”

Chris 2006/05/31 7:07 pm

Hello. I have downloaded and installed livebookmarks on WP 2.0.2. I have activated in the admin panel. How do i get something to show on my index page? I assume i should have a rss icon next to my categories? Your instructions do not say what to do next. Thanks for any help

Chris

Ryan 2006/06/01 7:40 am

I have a created a site for the community over at somethingawful where the users can post their podcasts. What i am looking for is a plugin that allows readers to subscribe to RSS feeds from certain authors. I thought it would be nice if I were able to have wordpress create RSS feeds that were organized according to the authors and the users could then subscribe to the ones they liked for the podcasts. Is this a plugin you would be willing to write or do you know of someone I could ask about it?

Perishable 2006/06/04 3:08 pm • Post Author

Chris, you are confused. The CLB plugin does not add any icons to your webpages. The plugin writes feed links to the head of your source code, thereby enabling Firefox and Opera browsers to automatically detect any available feeds. After the plugin is installed and activated, use Firefox or Opera to open your WP index page. Look for the small, orange RSS feed icon in the address bar, and click on it. You should see a list of all non-empty feeds available from that page.

Perishable 2006/06/04 3:43 pm • Post Author

Ryan, you don't need a plugin for this. Simply use either the list_authors or wp_list_authors function, and employ the feed parameter. There are also parameters for full names, empty feeds, and option counts. You may read more at the WordPress Codex.

Vanessa 2006/06/08 10:15 am

Hi, I am new to the bloging world.
I have made a blog site and now I want users to bes able to subscribe to rss feeds from my main index page. It seems that my word press is spitting out version 0.92 which can not be read by my yahoo rss reader. Do you know how it can spit out 2.0?

Perishable 2006/06/11 1:41 pm • Post Author

Vanessa, looks like you already found a solution, as your source code currently specifies RSS 2.0 for all feed links. Nonetheless, the Category LiveBookmarks plugin invokes RSS-2.0 XML by default, and actually makes no reference to RSS 0.92.

The problem you were having most likely resulted from the native WP function, bloginfo()¹, which is commonly called from within the <head> (for implicit links), or from within the <body> (for explicit links). Each call to bloginfo() will invoke RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0 (RDF), RSS 2.0, or Atom, depending on which parameter is used². Although each of these syndication formats is available for your WP posts, only the RSS 2.0 format is available for comments.

Thus, if you want only implicit RSS-2.0 feeds available via LiveBookmarks, edit your <head> by adding <?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?> (for post feeds), and <?php bloginfo('comments_rss2_url'); ?> (for comment feeds). Then, be sure to delete any calls to bloginfo('rdf_url'), bloginfo('rss_url'), or bloginfo('atom_url').

To provide explicit feeds (in any format) from the sidebar, footer, or elsewhere within the <body>, simply call bloginfo() and use the appropriate function parameter (e.g., rss2_url or atom_url).

References:

¹ About bloginfo() at the WordPress Codex
² About WordPress Feeds at the WordPress Codex

August 2006/06/13 8:25 am

FYI, the link in this post that points to a summary of the "many important modifications" seems broken. I tried following the link and ended up pretty much nowhere. Just thought you should know..

Perishable 2006/06/13 8:31 am • Post Author

Thanks, August, I will deploy the goon squad to "fix" the problem.

DLa 2006/06/13 8:38 am

Apparently, the arunrocks site hasn't been updated for several weeks. Perhaps you would be so kind as to post the changes here as a comment?

Perishable 2006/06/13 9:23 am • Post Author

The original Livemarks plugin suffered from invalid XHTML, improper "type" attributes, and (in my opinion) sloppy PHP authorship. In addition to resolving these issues, the new CLB plugin automatically omits empty categories and subcategories, as well as providing contextually relevant feed links for category views. Finally, the new CLB plugin enables users to customize the "title" attribute of their feed links.

August Klotz 2006/06/13 9:37 am

Muchas gracias, Perecedero!

Perishable 2006/08/07 1:02 am • Post Author

Thanks for the idea, Avery! The Category LiveBookmarks plugin has just been updated to provide optional category feed links in the footer, sidebar, or anywhere else you could possibly imagine. Now, with one easy plugin, you can have your RSS feeds autodiscovered and provided as links within your site.

Comments are closed for this post. Something to add? Let me know.

Chris 2006/05/31 7:07 pm

Hello. I have downloaded and installed livebookmarks on WP 2.0.2. I have activated in the admin panel. How do i get something to show on my index page? I assume i should have a rss icon next to my categories? Your instructions do not say what to do next. Thanks for any help

Chris
Ryan 2006/06/01 7:40 am

I have a created a site for the community over at somethingawful where the users can post their podcasts. What i am looking for is a plugin that allows readers to subscribe to RSS feeds from certain authors. I thought it would be nice if I were able to have wordpress create RSS feeds that were organized according to the authors and the users could then subscribe to the ones they liked for the podcasts. Is this a plugin you would be willing to write or do you know of someone I could ask about it?
Perishable 2006/06/04 3:08 pm • Post Author

Chris, you are confused. The CLB plugin does not add any icons to your webpages. The plugin writes feed links to the head of your source code, thereby enabling Firefox and Opera browsers to automatically detect any available feeds. After the plugin is installed and activated, use Firefox or Opera to open your WP index page. Look for the small, orange RSS feed icon in the address bar, and click on it. You should see a list of all non-empty feeds available from that page.
Perishable 2006/06/04 3:43 pm • Post Author

Ryan, you don't need a plugin for this. Simply use either the list_authors or wp_list_authors function, and employ the feed parameter. There are also parameters for full names, empty feeds, and option counts. You may read more at the WordPress Codex.
Vanessa 2006/06/08 10:15 am

Hi, I am new to the bloging world.
I have made a blog site and now I want users to bes able to subscribe to rss feeds from my main index page. It seems that my word press is spitting out version 0.92 which can not be read by my yahoo rss reader. Do you know how it can spit out 2.0?
Perishable 2006/06/11 1:41 pm • Post Author

Vanessa, looks like you already found a solution, as your source code currently specifies RSS 2.0 for all feed links. Nonetheless, the Category LiveBookmarks plugin invokes RSS-2.0 XML by default, and actually makes no reference to RSS 0.92.

The problem you were having most likely resulted from the native WP function, bloginfo()¹, which is commonly called from within the <head> (for implicit links), or from within the <body> (for explicit links). Each call to bloginfo() will invoke RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0 (RDF), RSS 2.0, or Atom, depending on which parameter is used². Although each of these syndication formats is available for your WP posts, only the RSS 2.0 format is available for comments.

Thus, if you want only implicit RSS-2.0 feeds available via LiveBookmarks, edit your <head> by adding <?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?> (for post feeds), and <?php bloginfo('comments_rss2_url'); ?> (for comment feeds). Then, be sure to delete any calls to bloginfo('rdf_url'), bloginfo('rss_url'), or bloginfo('atom_url').

To provide explicit feeds (in any format) from the sidebar, footer, or elsewhere within the <body>, simply call bloginfo() and use the appropriate function parameter (e.g., rss2_url or atom_url).

References:

¹ About bloginfo() at the WordPress Codex
² About WordPress Feeds at the WordPress Codex
August 2006/06/13 8:25 am

FYI, the link in this post that points to a summary of the "many important modifications" seems broken. I tried following the link and ended up pretty much nowhere. Just thought you should know..
Perishable 2006/06/13 8:31 am • Post Author

Thanks, August, I will deploy the goon squad to "fix" the problem.
DLa 2006/06/13 8:38 am

Apparently, the arunrocks site hasn't been updated for several weeks. Perhaps you would be so kind as to post the changes here as a comment?
Perishable 2006/06/13 9:23 am • Post Author

The original Livemarks plugin suffered from invalid XHTML, improper "type" attributes, and (in my opinion) sloppy PHP authorship. In addition to resolving these issues, the new CLB plugin automatically omits empty categories and subcategories, as well as providing contextually relevant feed links for category views. Finally, the new CLB plugin enables users to customize the "title" attribute of their feed links.
August Klotz 2006/06/13 9:37 am

Muchas gracias, Perecedero!
Perishable 2006/08/07 1:02 am • Post Author

Thanks for the idea, Avery! The Category LiveBookmarks plugin has just been updated to provide optional category feed links in the footer, sidebar, or anywhere else you could possibly imagine. Now, with one easy plugin, you can have your RSS feeds autodiscovered and provided as links within your site.

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