Promoting an RSS Feed
Helping your visitors find and use your feed.
Add a Discovery Link
Add a discovery link to your head element of your pages. This lets browsers and extensions that have the ability to indicate to you that there’s a feed to subscribe to.
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="https://www.htmlhobbyist.com/feeds/feed.xml" title="The HTML Hobbyist RSS Feed">
Make sure that you add a discovery link for each of your syndicated feeds that you want to be discoverable.
Create a Hyperlink
Add links directly to your feeds on your pages.
<a href="https://www.htmlhobbyist.com/feed.xml" type="application/rss+xml">The HTML Hobbyist Updates RSS Feed</a>The link can be put in your footer, header, menu, on your feed page, or just about anywhere else that you think of where it makes sense to link to it. When your visitors click on it they’ll see the raw XML, the XSLT styled page that you set up, or a version of the page as styled by their in-browser feed reader.
Display RSS Images
Use the recognizable RSS icons or feed buttons to link to your feed, and display them proudly alongside your email and social media icons.
I made these images using SVG (another SGML language). Feel free to download them and use them on your own site. Or find them in the wild on the World Wide Web.
Make a Feed Page
If you have more than one feed you might find it useful to create a feed page to list all of your syndicated content.
Search the web for prior art to see how others are using their syndicated feeds and presenting their feeds on their own feeds page.
- The NASA Feeds page contains feeds for The Image of the Day, missions, NASACast, and facility news.
- The O’Reilly Media Radar Feeds page provides feeds for a variety of topics and tags (events, research, etc.).
- The Wired Magazine RSS Feeds page has feeds for tops stories and magazine sections.
- The Pennsylvania General Assembly RSS Feed page provides schedules, calendars, and meeting notes.
- The NY Times feed page includes feeds for sections, columns, columnists, and their marketplace.
When you make a feed page, don’t assume that your visitors know what syndicated feeds are or how to use them. Educating your visitors will pay off in the long run. Tell them that you have a syndicated feed and let them know how to get a feed reader.
Maintain Your Feed
Don’t forget to update your feed to reflect your web content when it changes. If you don’t update your feed contents, then this entire exercise is pointless.
And don’t forget to prune your syndicated feed when necessary. Decide on a maximum length for your feed. About twenty items is usually a good length. Remove the older entries when new entries are added.
An active healthy feed, free of clutter, will promote itself.
Fellow Feeds
Did you write a feed based off of these instructions? Contact me and I can add you to this list of 10 fellow feeds (pending content approval):
- This could be you.
- This could be you.
- This could be you.
- This could be you.
- This could be you.
- This could be you.
- This could be you.
- This could be you.
- This could be you.
- This could be you.