Exposed RSS Chris Coyier

March 30, 2024

January 13, 2024

I get sites not having an “RSS” for “Feed” link on their website while actually having an RSS feed. I don’t like it, but I get it. Maybe they picked an off-the-shelf theme that doesn’t have that. Maybe they just forgot. Maybe they even don’t want to.

I somehow never considered sites that have an RSS feed that don’t expose it in the HTML. As Robb Knight says:

This is called RSS auto-discovery and is a standard way to expose RSS feeds to help browsers and other software to automatically find a site’s RSS feed.

Like the standard link, a lot of sites were also missing this. This is (at least as a first step) what feed reeders like NetNewsWire will use to automatically find a feed when you paste in a URL. If you have an RSS feed, you should have the following in the head of your website:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="My Cool Website" href="https://example.com/feed.xml" /> <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="My Cool Website" href="https://example.com/atom.xml" />Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

I typically don’t even bother looking for a feed link. If I can smell that your site has a feed and I want to subscribe to it, I just chuck your homepage URL into my feed reader “Add” function and let it find what it needs. If it doesn’t find one I’m like oh well bummer.

So yeah — if you’re going to bother having a feed, or get one for free, make sure you’ve got that <link> tag in place or anybody like me will assume you don’t even have one.

🤘

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