RSS Auto Discovery – Help Your Readers

A little bit ago I asked my followers on Twitter the following question:

If you know me, you will know why this page is a fail…hint: nothing to do with the look of the page http://traveler.nationalgeographic.com/

Head over there and take a look. Did you find it? I really hope so. I’ve written about this before but it is time to talk about it again. Actually I am kind of appalled that things like this are still happening in this day and age. Not my intention to pick on National Geographic or any other site. Merely used as a demonstration.

What I’m referring to here is RSS Auto-discovery. Auto-discovery is the magic behind the scenes of your blog or web page that lets modern browsers like Firefox and IE discover your feed URL. If you use Firefox I am sure you have noticed the feed icon in the address bar. It looks like this:

 

The code needed to do that will look something like this very simplified version:

<html>
<head>
<title>This is my Blog</title>
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS”
href=”http://www.myblog.com/feed”>
</head>
<body>

In the <head> section of your page you should have a <link> element. Written just like the one above with all the other necessary bits of ‘rel’ and ‘type’ will work the magic. Of course the link to your feed should replace the URL I have above. And be sure it is the feed you want people to use! You may have a feed that is auto generated by WordPress but if you have signed up with Feedburner, you probably will need to update the template on your blog.

One more quick thing…. that National Geographic page does have a feed. Did you find the link? It is buried at the bottom of the page. Don’t do that.

Update: Forgot to post a link to the specifications on RSS discovery: http://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery Thanks Randy!


This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 at 10:59 am and is filed under How-To, RSS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “RSS Auto Discovery – Help Your Readers”

  1. Randy Charles Morin, on September 2nd, 2009 at 8:18 am Said:

    Don’t forget to point them to the spec.

    http://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery

  2. admin, on February 2nd, 2011 at 5:12 pm Said:

    My example moved. Have a look here: http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/intelligenttravel/

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