Please, Expose your RSS 🔗

Earlier this week I had a need to manually find a bunch of people’s RSS feed links. It seemed simple enough: go to their website and look for an RSS/Subscribe link but I was surprised to find that a lot of people don’t have a link anywhere to their feed.

Even if people only ever add your website into their feed reader and let the app find the RSS feed (see below for more info on this), showing an RSS link reminds people that RSS exists, a win for the open web.

Hear, hear! I’ll raise you a ‘Subscribe’ or a ‘Feeds’ page that describes what each one contains.

@jarrod I’m kind of mixed on this. Anything you’d use to subscribe to RSS will work when you past the URL of my website in… I’m not sure the clutter of “follow me this way” makes sense. Then again, I don’t advertise any specific methods for how to “follow” me on my site, so maybe that makes me the odd man out…

@jsonbecker Your site is a good web citizen, so RSS readers would find your feed, but I think @robb’s experience was that not everyone’s site does the headers well. And there are other cases when folks might be looking for the feed URL to share, or collect, when having it visible is helpful. I also like his point that it brings more attention to RSS as a thing. My page might be a little overboard, but if it helps teach someone about RSS and how to use it, I’m okay with the clutter trade-off.

@Gaby I think in an ‘About’ page is great too! Wherever you talk about the site makes sense. I just wanted to expand upon RSS in general and give that explanation about how to use it, which is how I ended up with a separate page. But there’s something to a link being visible somewhere on your home page — even if just the RSS icon.

@jarrod Just added a “Socials & RSS” item to the sidebar on my home page. Thanks for the nudge to do this, I think it is a great idea!