Industry guru Dave Taylor offers free tech support on a wide variety of technical and business topics, including HTML, Apple iPhone, online advertising, Cascading Style Sheets, Web design, management, Unix, Linux, search engine optimization, online dating, Mac OS X, shell script programming and Microsoft Windows.

How do I set up my blog for RSS autodiscovery?

I think I have my weblog set up properly, but someone recently emailed me saying that I haven't set it up for "RSS autodiscovery". But I have an RSS feed and I even have a little 'xml' button that links to the "index.xml" file that contains the RSS. So what am I missing?

Dave's Answer:

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:

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!

Help others find this article at Del.icio.us, Digg, Netscape, Reddit, and Stumble Upon

Categorized: Blogs and RSS Feeds (Article 4210)
Tagged:
Previous: How do I connect my Mac to a WPA Wireless network?
Next: How does SSL Work?

Subscribe!

Never miss another useful Q&A article again! Subscribe to AskDaveTaylor with Google Reader.

Comments

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.

Posted by: Bob Rankin at October 2, 2005 2:13 PM

Dave

Does it make any difference if I had my burned feed address at Feedburner showing in the Auto Discovery URL?

I am worried that overall my stats at Feedburner show approx 7,000 daily readers, but my domain stats report a smaller daily figure -- can the Feedburner URL (instead of my own in this format "www.mydomain.com/blog/atom.xml") in the meta tags have any effect on this discrepancy

I also noticed on joining Blog TopSites that again this huge discrepancy in web stats is showing up. Blog Topsites only report a mere 100 or so daily hits which is totally inaccurate, and yet my own domain and Feedburner stats are thankfully much higher.

Many thanks
Roseanne

Posted by: Roseanne van L at October 10, 2005 3:05 PM

As far as I know, Roseanne, it doesn't matter what URL you show, as long as you have a properly constructed autodiscovery URL in your code.

Posted by: Dave Taylor at October 11, 2005 3:30 AM

Hi Dave,

Am trying to get the autodiscovery to work, however I think am giving the wrong link. I keep getting this message.
Not Found
The requested URL /rss.xml was not found on this server.

what link do I need to give? if u go to my website and click the rss feed then that works. I gave the same link as that but still get that message for autodiscovery, any thoughts?

thanks

Posted by: lee hughes at July 12, 2009 6:39 AM

hello,
im martin
the problrm is i can find my blog when i search with google or other serrch engine
can you make for me rss code for my blog
because i dont understand nothing of programming !
thank you martin

Posted by: martin at August 27, 2009 7:09 AM

I have a lot to say, but ...

I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!