RSS Feed Autodiscovery
May 1st, 2009
The feed autodiscovery is a technique that allows browsers and feed readers to automatically discover feeds on websites.
How this works?
RSS Wiz and all modern web browsers and feed readers automatically detect the URL of the RSS feeds by looking for a link element in the <head> section of the HTML or XHTML code. The format of the link is as follows:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://...">
It is mandatory for the the link element to have the "href", "rel" and "type" attributes. The attribute "title" is optional.
href - The URL to the feed*
rel - For autodiscovery this attribute should contains the value "alternate"
type - Feed's MIME type. For RSS 1.0 and 2.0 feeds in should be "application/rss+xml"
title - A human-readable label (optional attribute)
*Although RSS Wiz detects both relative and full URLs we recommend the usage of the full URL which guarantees the correct discovery by using other feed readers.
To test the autodiscovery of the RSS feed of your site go to http://www.rsswiz.com/get-the-code/ and enter the URL of your website (not the URL of your feed!) and click on the "Generate" button. If your feed is detected and read successfully (RSS feed only, Atom feed is not supported) your feed will be displayed in a table bellow the "Generate" button.
Categories: RSS Feed
