SubToMe is a universal subscribe button. It decouples the content to which a user can subscribe from the application this user may want to use to perform the subscription. It's loosely inspired by WebIntents.
The spec is the code, and the code is open source. Feel free to contribute to it. You could very well run your own instance, but that means users may have to reselect their favorite subscription tool over and over again.
By design, all state is kept in the user's browser, using localStorage.
This is intended to be run as a bookmarklet or an embedded button on any web page.
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A user visits a site that is able to provide some kind of subscription mechanism. That web application will then embed in its page some code that will register this application on behalf of the user.
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The subscription button script will store in the user's session the fact that he can use the previously described app for subscriptions.
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Later, when on another site which publishes content, the user wants to follow a given resource and clicks on the bookmarklet.
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The user is then showed the list of services that may be able to handle his subscription.
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Once the user picks a service, he's sent to that service to complete the subscription.
Ant0ine very kindly contributed a SubToMe Chrome Extension (Google removed from the store as of December 2015). Source code.
Sören contributed a SubToMe Firefox extension!
WordPress plugin. Install it by following these instructions or look for SubToMe in your WordPress Dashboard's plugin interface.
Check Github Issues for more TODOs
We intentionally pushed the complexity down to the subscribing application, which should be smart enough to handle subscriptions if it has registered as such.
The subscribing application is in charge of extracting the data to which the user can subscribe (RSS or Atom feed, Social network handle, ... etc), from the page URL.
Check the store.
Feel free to add yours if you implemented registration. Make sure you support registration as well for your existing users.
SubToMe uses Grunt.js for its build process and tests.
Ant0ine for the Chrome extension, Sören for the Firefox extension, Matthias for his help with the WordPress plugin.