A reader asks:

Yahoo's RSS Feed has thumbnail pictures with the excerpt when you view The Feed in FireFox-Sage. Any idea how to make that work?

To be honest, I had no idea what the reader was talking about, so I gired up FeedDemon and added one a sample Yahoo RSS feed. Sure enough - an image popped up. So, knowing nothing, I did what any good web developer does - I went to View Source. Inside the regular RSS 2.0 feed I found this:

<media:content url="http://a super long url I trimmed" type="image/jpeg" height="99" width="130"/> <media:text> Some html I trimmed </media:text> <media:credit role="provider">(Reuters)</media:credit>

While I don't consider myself an RSS expert, I have done some research and I certainly did not remember a media element. Turns out this was an extension to the RSS spec added by Yahoo. Yahoo calls it Media RSS 1.0 (More information may be found here.)

As with any extension, it will be up to the reader to actually use it. As I said above, FeedDemon had no problem with it, so I'm assuming more and more readers will be able to use it. (By "reader" I mean RSS applications.)