Feed icon tip

[ryanhellyer]

Have you ever seen those little orange icons in the address bar of your browser? They're present in all modern browsers when they're on a site which has specified an XML feed for the page. If you click on them, they give you a feed for the site you are on. Some feed readers also allow you to drag and drop the icon into the reader.

Here's the code you need to display the icon ...

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Domain.com feed" href="http://domain.com/xxx" />

You can specify any page on your site for the link to go to, but it's generally recommended to set it to an XML feed as that is what they're designed for and some feed readers allow users to drag and drop from the icon to the reader, and using an HTML page (perhaps with links to various XML feeds) would cause an error to occur.

Hopefully some of you will find this useful. RSS feeds are growing in popularity and are rapidly becoming a primary means of reading information on the web for some tech savvy.

[BigAlReturns]

Good advice Ryan - remember also that you can have multiple feeds per page, simply by having multiple <link rel=".... tags. This means you could have say, the main site feed listed on every page, and also comments for existing pages. Comments RSS feeds are often missed out on custom coded sites, and for me they're a real must, as I don't want to visit 10 sites a day to see if anyone replied to me!

[ryanhellyer]

Originally Posted by BigAlReturns

... you can have multiple feeds per page, simply by having multiple <link rel=".... tags. This means you could have say, the main site feed listed on every page, and also comments for existing pages.

How do you use the extra <link rel=" ... " />'s though?


One little orange RSS thingy shows up, but what happens when you have two RSS feeds on the same page?

[BigAlReturns]

Not sure about what happens in all browsers. but in FF you're given a drop down menu containing the titles of the 2 feeds, and choose which one you want to subscribe to.