RSS4Results.com» Publishing http://rss4results.com All about using and publishing RSS Feeds Sun, 09 Dec 2007 03:56:33 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 RSS:Forward Plugin http://rss4results.com/publishing/rssforward-plugin http://rss4results.com/publishing/rssforward-plugin#comments Sun, 29 Jul 2007 11:05:19 +0000 nigelb http://rss4results.com/publishing/rssforward-plugin If your blog or website targets technically savvy readers you can be pretty sure that they will be conversant with the RSS feeds generated by your site.

However, in the real world, the majority of visitors to commercial or business related sites will have little or no idea of what an RSS feed is. Worse still, they will not be in a position to be advised when you post new information on your site.

This is why I created RSS:Forward, a service which converts any site’s RSS feed into email messages. In simple terms, a subscriber will receive an email message with the introductory part of any new addition to the site, along with a link to the page where they can read the full content.

Now all we need is a simple mechanism to allow our visitors to subscribe to the RSS:Forward service. Generic instructions for adding subscription buttons, forms etc can be found here.

But, if your site is a Wordpress blog, I’ve made it even easier for you by releasing the RSS:Forward Plugin.

Full details, and the download files, are here

]]> http://rss4results.com/publishing/rssforward-plugin/feed 0 What is RSS Auto-discovery? http://rss4results.com/publishing/autodiscovery http://rss4results.com/publishing/autodiscovery#comments Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000 nigelb Your site has an RSS feed, right? If so you’ll have some form of link to the feed on your page. But you can go one step further with auto-discovery.

Adding a RSS feed auto-discovery to your web site is essentially a usability feature. It allows modern browsers capable of RSS auto discovery such as Firefox or Safari, and the next version of Internet Explorer, to display a nice RSS icon RSS. Your visitors can then click on the icon to subscribe to the site’s RSS feed within the browsers.

In addition, various RSS tools such as RSS:Forward, can use the auto-discovery feature of your site to easily find the URL of your feed.

Does my site have auto-discovery enabled?

The easiest way to see if your site already has auto-discovery enables is to surf to your home page using a suitable browser. Depending on the specific version of the browser, you will see an icon in either the status bar or location bar similar to what you see below.

How to enable auto-discovery

All you need to do is add the following line of code to the <head> section of your page or template.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
title="YOUR_RSS_FEED_TITLE_HERE"
href="YOUR_RSS_FEED_URL_HERE" />

  • Obviously replace the portion of the above code to include your own feed title and URL.
  • If the RSS your web site publishes is in a different format, you will need to change the type as well. For example, ATOM feeds’ type should be set to type="application/atom+xml"
  • Lastly if you publish multiple feeds, you can just add as many link tags as needed.

And you’re done. Now load your web site in Firefox or Safari and you should see a RSS feed icon in the address bar like this:

Addressbar

Action plan

If you are your own webmaster, plan to add this snippet of code to your site as soon as possible. Otherwise, send a link to this article to your webmaster requesting that he or she adds auto-discovery to your site.

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