RSS Autodiscovery

Yesterday I visited a blog I hadn’t noticed before. I liked it, so I clicked the Direct Subscribe Icon (provided by the Better Greader Firefox Add-On).

As a result the Google Reader opened and told me that there were no articles for this feed. Weird.

Hmm, the address Google showed was the blog’s default WordPress feed address.

I really wanted to subscribe, so I tried it a second time. This time I clicked on the RSS button in the address field, which resulted in an error message.

I know, I could always just click on an RSS icon somewhere on the blog, but I tend to use the aforementioned methods. Both of them use the RSS autodiscovery feature, which requires the correct feed address in your blog’s header. In this case the blog used feedburner for the feeds, but when a new theme was installed, the default variables where not changed.

Which brings me to my question: Do you know where your RSS autodiscovery sends your visitors?

If you’re not sure, try to subscribe to your blog using one of the two methods mentioned above.

Solutions

The simple way: Download the Feed Locations WordPress Plugin, and enter your feedburner address. This tells WordPress to use the feed location of your choice, everytime a variable (like rss2_url) is called.

The get your-hands-dirty way: Open your theme’s header.php in a text editor. Look for:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />

and replace it with:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeedname" />

Save & upload it. You’re done. Keep a copy of your old header.php when you change stuff (Trust me - I have a black belt in Brea Kin Thinx ;-))

Now, when I visit you’re blog, I can subscribe to your feed the way I like it.

19 Responses to “RSS Autodiscovery”

bloggingzoom.com on November 8th, 2007 at 6:04 pm

RSS Autodiscovery…

Yesterday I visited a blog I hadn’t noticed before. I liked it, so I clicked the Direct Subscribe Icon (provided by the Better Greader Firefox Add-On).

As a result the Google Reader opened and told me that there were no articles for this feed. Weird…
Weekly Links - November 10th << Vandelay Website Design on November 10th, 2007 at 4:42 pm

[…] RSS Autodiscovery from Bloggers Journey. […]
Wedding Fort Lauderdale on August 23rd, 2008 at 5:07 am

Thanks for the tips and the information buddy. Keep up the good work.
Sourcing China on November 27th, 2008 at 12:20 pm

RSS autodiscovery is a technique that makes it possible for browsers and other software to automatically find a site’s RSS feed, whether it’s in RSS 1.0 or RSS 2.0 format.
China Procurement on November 27th, 2008 at 12:23 pm

If you decide to include more than one autodiscovery link, the first link should be the site’s main feed.Supported by Mozilla Firefox 3.0, Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 and other browsers, autodiscovery has become the best way to inform users that a web site offers a syndication feed.
Birmingham dentist on June 5th, 2009 at 8:16 am

Useful rss auto discovery tip to make easy and effective work.
Russell Cohen on July 15th, 2009 at 8:31 pm

The Feed Locations WordPress Plugin sounds like a great idea. Any idea whether one would use it instead of or in addition to the elusive Feedburner Feedsmith plugin?
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