I installed IE8 beta 2 yesterday and it rocks. It is much faster than IE7, seems rock stable (fingers crossed) and has all kind of nifty new features. It has taken away my need for Firefox at the moment.

In FF I had a button that allowed me to subscribe to a blog in google reader and it works in Internet explorer as well:

javascript:var%20b=document.body;var%20GR________bookmarklet_domain='http://www.google.com';if(b&&!document.xmlVersion){void(z=document.createElement('script'));void(z.src='http://www.google.com/reader/ui/subscribe-bookmarklet.js');void(b.appendChild(z));}else{location='http://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/'+encodeURIComponent(location.href)}

Basically, you can navigate to a page with a blog in it and just press this bookmark. It will open up reader and it will show you the feed it finds.

But, given those cool accelerators in IE8, I thought it would be a nice exercise to create an accelerator that I can click when I am on a blog.
Here it is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<os:openServiceDescription

    xmlns:os="http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0">

    <os:homepageUrl>http://www.google.com</os:homepageUrl>

    <os:display>

        <os:name>Subscribe to rss feed </os:name>

        <os:description>View the feed in google reader</os:description>

    </os:display>

    <os:activity category="Blog">

        <os:activityAction context="document">

            <os:execute action="http://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/{documentUrl}" method="get">

            </os:execute>

        </os:activityAction>

    </os:activity>

</os:openServiceDescription>  

Since the accelerator api will not recognize an url like this: http://www.sitechno.com/Blog/SyndicationService.asmx/GetRss as a ‘Link’, I had to use the document context. When you install this accelerator, you can navigate to the actual feed and then rightclick anywhere in the page. There should be an option to ‘subscribe to rss feed’ and hitting that will take you to google.

These accelerators have potential: it was very simple to write this and it is well integrated into IE. I hope they extend it so we can get accelerators to work on more ‘stuff’!

Install googlereader subscription accelerator