Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom

Once You Have Created Your Simple RSS Feed

Once you have created your feed, there are just one or two more things to do. None of these are mandatory, but they are all so simple, and give so much to the richness of the Net, that you are encouraged to invest the little time needed. You can work through these one by one in about half an hour.

Publish a Link

Place a link to the RSS feed on your page! People regularly forget to do this and wonder why, after looking at their server logs, no one is subscribed to their feed. There are standard icons emerging from each of the news aggregators and desktop readers—some of these are freely available for this use, but even a simple text link is better than nothing at all. The original icon for RSS (see Figure 9-1) was the white-on-orange XML logo, produced by Userland Software. Most of the other logos (see Figures Figure 9-2 and Figure 9-3) stem artistically from this one vision. With the advent of Atom, the wording on the button is beginning to change. My prediction is that it will change to the word “Feed” over time, but the arguments over the standard syndication feed button have been almost as fraught as those over the standards themselves. At time of writing, for example, it looks as if the next version of Apple’s Mac OS X will contain an RSS reader that uses a version of the button colored blue. A schism looms on the horizon for those who care about such things.

Figure 9-1. The original XML button

Figure 9-2. The XML button with the Radio ...