Make your feed discoverable

Time and time again I come across fantastic blogs that I want to subscribe to but can’t find a feed for. First I try putting the site into my RSS reader (Miniflux is my tool of choice) but it often can’t find anything. Then I search around the site for the little RSS icon or a link but come up blank. As a last resort I start sticking common paths on the domain and with some luck I might finally find a feed on /feed.xml or /rss/. RSS feeds aren’t dead , there isn’t a reason for it to be this hard.

I understand publishing feed links might not fit some website designs and isn’t something I’m going to suggest everyone goes out and fixes.

What I do think is fair is websites properly publishing their feeds so my feed reader can find them automatically. Most modern CMS’ do this properly but with the rise of people writing their own themes from scratch properly linking them often gets left by the wayside.

All they need to do is add link elements in their head section like this:

<link rel="alternate" href="/index.xml" type="application/rss+xml" title="James Loh feed" />

Thats it. My RSS reader now picks up the feed and title set and I can subscribe in one click via Miniflux’s bookmarklet.

Please, don’t forget to add your feeds properly.