The very latest generation of Web browsers, including Firefox, Safari and the new (still in beta) Internet Explorer 7.0, magically recognize when you're on a Web page that has an associated RSS feed and enables a subscribe button or otherwise shows you that you can choose to subscribe to the site.
But, of course, it's not actually magic, it's simply that those sites have a special line of HTML in their source pages, a line that you can add to your blog template in a jiffy or even hand-code into related Web pages that are part of your site but perhaps not part of your blog.
My RSS autodiscovery declaration looks like this:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
title="Ask Dave Taylor"
href=" http://www.askdavetaylor.com/index.rdf" />
You'll want to tweak yours to match the settings of your particular Web site, of course, but that's the basic format.
Some sites include more than one of these declarations in their source, but the consensus of most RSS mavens is that only the first one counts when Web browsers (and RSS readers, for that matter) ascertain what URL to use for your subscription.
And, finally, just in case you got to here and you're still a bit in the dark, you might find it helpful to read What is an RSS aggregator? and the additional RSS information here at Ask Dave Taylor.
Hope that clarifies things!
Sign up for my weekly AskDaveTaylor Newsletter and you'll receive even more tech and gadget help
right to your inbox, along with exclusive news and industry updates. It's good stuff. I promise!
It's worth noting that Moveable Type doesn't do this quite right, unless you tweak your templates. You'll find that it puts the Atom-style feed (which is marginally used) first in the list of auto-discovery lines, and the title is a less than useful "RSS". At the very least, if you run MT, you should put the name of your blog/feed in the title area of that link tag. And perhaps even more useful, remove the link for the Atom feed.