|
You may have found this blog from a link on another web site, an email signature, or just word-of-mouth. Or was it the RSS auto-discovery tag?
Before we dive into this, let me explain exactly what an auto-discovery tag is.
It's a simple line of code you insert into the top of every web page across your site which indicates to users that your site has a feed. If the user is running RSS compatible software (which looks for this tag), then they will get a little notification mentioning that they can subscribe to your feed. It's like a big flag waving around saying "Hey! I use RSS! Subscribe and hear what I have to say tommorow".
What a great way to grow your web site traffic! But it gets even better.
I'm amazed at how many web sites out there publish RSS feeds and neglect to include an auto-discovery tag. Without this tag, most users will never even know that your site has a feed.
But wait a sec. Internet Explorer 6.0 ignores this tag. So do a lot of other web browsers and you may already include a little orange XML icon on the right-side/bottom/top of all your pages, linking to your feed. Why should you care then? Two words: Windows Vista
Internet Explorer 7, which is due out at the end of 2006 for businesses and early 2007 for the rest of us, will come packed with major - let me capitalize that one - Major support for RSS feeds. It will literly be integrated directly into the operating system. More than that, it will also have an RSS auto-discovery feature just like you see in Mozilla Firefox if you have the proper extension installed.
I'm sure you're convinced about the importance of having an RSS auto-discovery tag. So let me show you what you need to paste into your web pages.
Paste the following link into each page on your site where you wish for users to be notified that you have a feed. Of course, replace http://feeds.feedburner.com/ksoft with the URL to your own feed.
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/ksoft" />
If you want to see a real-world example, go ahead and click View-Source in your web browser to catch our tag.
Pretty simple, but powerful stuff.
|
