I get sites not having an “RSS” for “Feed” link on their website while actually having an RSS feed. I don’t like it, but I get it. Maybe they picked an off-the-shelf theme that doesn’t have that. Maybe they just forgot. Maybe they even don’t want to.
I somehow never considered sites that have an RSS feed that don’t expose it in the HTML. As Robb Knight says:
This is called RSS auto-discovery and is a standard way to expose RSS feeds to help browsers and other software to automatically find a site’s RSS feed.
Like the standard link, a lot of sites were also missing this. This is (at least as a first step) what feed reeders like NetNewsWire will use to automatically find a feed when you paste in a URL. If you have an RSS feed, you should have the following in the
headof your website:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="My Cool Website" href="https://example.com/feed.xml" />
<!-- use application/atom+xml for an atom feed -->
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="My Cool Website" href="https://example.com/atom.xml" />Code language: HTML, XML (xml)I typically don’t even bother looking for a feed link. If I can smell that your site has a feed and I want to subscribe to it, I just chuck your homepage URL into my feed reader “Add” function and let it find what it needs. If it doesn’t find one I’m like oh well bummer.
So yeah — if you’re going to bother having a feed, or get one for free, make sure you’ve got that <link> tag in place or anybody like me will assume you don’t even have one.
What‘s your favourite feed reader?
Feedbin
On my website, the RSS is announced through metadata only on the news page. Per the “Exposed RSS” statement, it should be linked from all pages? I wonder whether it really makes sense to subscribe to a page without checking it out on such a cursory level as to find the news page, though?
I can only speak for myself but a lot of the time I’ll subscribe to a site based off a random page I read, it isn’t always a blog post. So for me, I want it linked on every page like the header or footer.
Yup, it should absolutely be on every page, or at least every page that would be navigable from said feed.
I bury the feed link in footers for Ctrl-F people, but use the link tag for actual feed readers. The XML is never pleasant to (accidentally) go to.
That being said, this week I learned about styling feeds with XSLT, so this could just as well be a different way to produce a blog archive, see e.g.
https://sachachua.com/blog/2024/01/xml-stylesheet-for-my-feed/
Browsers should have this as a default. Firefox did, then it got butchered in a very ignorant dumbing down / destroying of the free open standards that is supposedly their biggest reason for being.
Sure, get rid of the way they integrated it as a dynamic bookmark thing. I don’t know if anyone bemoaned that implementation disappearing.
But to destroy any and all support for exposing RSS feed availability from all browser UX? That’s a disgrace.
There’s a second best, but well written and maintained alternative in the form of the resurrected after the WebExtension butchering / sea change of Sage RSS. In the form of the Sage-Like extension.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sage-like/
Developer arielg has done a great job of rebuilding the old Sage RSS extension (that very strangely still has a functional website despite no releases since 2017):
http://sagerss.com/
arielg also maintains the extension with updates.
Although the feed discovery icon in the URL bar uses the Sage leaf icon that is not the familiar orange squared icon, once people have used the extension for a little while, it becomes quite familiar and the UX is very handy.
In the eejiotic absence of the merest of “hey, this site has a feed you can bookmark or try reading via an extension” icon / tooltip / panel discovery UX in Firefox, the (RSS) Sage-Like extension is highly worth giving a go.
Thanks for sharing this—wish I knew about it earlier! I’ve added a meta tag to my site, and filed an issue to add a note about this to the Astro RSS guide
Way to get after it!
I built feed.style that you can easily convert the “wall of XML” into a halfway decent HTML page with instructions and links.
It uses XSLT and you can embed the XSLT in your feed so you don’t need to add a file to your web server.
Open source – suggestions welcome!