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Re: Fawcette's feed
One thing a site can do is put a <link> tag in the head section of
the web pages. We do it on Syndic8.com for our feeds. We even do it
on the per-feed info pages, using each feed's own RSS URL. Many
sites do it on theirs as well (mine on ideaspace.net do it also)
Here's the format:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS"
href="http://example.com/rssfile.xml"; >
Obviously, you should change the 'href' attribute value to the URL of
your RSS feed. The type attribute is the same regardless of RSS
version being used.
Many bookmarklets, RSS readers, browser helpers and other tools
understand how to look for this link tag metadata. This in addition
to using the xml button (in all it's wonderful variations...)
Since there are so many different ways an RSS feed can be generated
it's unreasonable to expect anything to be able to use a fixed
filename or path to find one. To poke around looking for these, let
alone on a spidering or scheduled basis, is a waste of time AND
bandwidth. The link tag gives them a quick and easy way to
immediately find your RSS feed(s).
Add the <link> tag to your page <head> section today!
-Bill Kearney
--- In syndication@yahoogroups.com, Julian Bond <julian_bond@v...>
wrote:
> Dave Winer <dave@u...> wrote:
> >Another new feed just showed up -- from Fawcette.
> >http://www.fawcette.com/rss.xml
> >Updated twice a day.
>
> Once the evangelism has succeeded and these relatively mainstream
sites
> start to produce RSS, as well as thanking them, it would be good to
> point out that there's no link to the RSS on their pages. And no
link in
> the page source either.
>
> It's quite frustrating to know that it's there somewhere but not be
able
> to guess the filename.
>
> Of course, this applies to an awful lot of amateur sites as well.