One click RSS feed subscription

With the release of Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7 has come one click subscriptions from your chosen web browser. This means that visitors to your site can now click on the RSS icon that appears in the address bar of their browser to subscribe to your feed.

As more and more visitors to your site are using RSS enabled web browsers it is time for you to make sure they are able to easily subscribe to your feed. Luckily it is really easy for you to do this now without much hassle.

One click RSS enable your site

For the RSS icon to appear in your web visitors address bar you need to add some HTML into the header of each webpage where you want your visitors to be able to subscribe.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="a descriptive name for your feed" href="http://www.yourfeedaddress.com/rssfeed.xml" >

You will need to place this line between the head tags in your page. Change the title to a descriptive name for your feed and change the href to the location of your RSS feed.

If you have multiple feeds just add a new line for each feed and just change the title and href accordingly.

I have shown the type as RSS XML as this is the most common format but this can be changed to whatever RSS format your feed is in.

Upload and test

Once you have added the new code upload your modified pages to your server and you can test to make sure the code is working. You will need to be using IE7 or FF2 yourself to see this properly. If you are currently using either of these browsers then click on the RSS icon in the address bar of this site to see how it works.

Now when your visitor visits your site and clicks on the icon in the address bar they will be taken to a page where the visitor can select from a list of RSS readers to add your feed to.

Universal RSS

So far in the history of RSS this is as universal as subscribing to a newsfeed has gotten. It means that RSS should become more ubiquitous to the user making it a more recognised information channel. It should benefit everyone that RSS is finally becoming easier for the end user.