Please Link to your RSS Feed
Bob Rubbens


I’ll keep this one short. When you:

1.  Have a blog.
2.  Offer an RSS/Atom feed.

Then please,

3.  Put a link to the feed on the front page!

(And if you don’t have a feed, please reconsider!)

Just somewhere in the footer, or some corner. It doesn’t have to be
large, it doesn’t have to be an icon, just a plain
<a href="feed.xml">Atom feed</a> suffices for all I care. I think it’s
pretty safe to say that it’s not so difficult to do this, and it makes
the barrier that much lower for readers to copy and paste your feed link
into their feed reader of choice.

Oh no, I ran into another one of those blogs that are worth following
yet don’t advertise their feed link anywhere!

No worries, I got you covered. Here’s what you can do to hunt down that
sweet sweet feed.xml.

-   If you use Firefox, have a look at the Livemarks extension. It puts
    a feed icon in the address bar when it detects a feed. Clicking the
    icon gives more info about the feed.
-   If you don’t mind doing some manual copy-pasting, try Edo’s
    workaround. By pasting a magic javascript expression into your
    developer console, the feed link, if present, is copied to your
    clipboard. Just perfect!
-   In a pinch, you can also use an external service to sleuth around
    for the feed link for you. When this is necessary, I usually turn to
    https://rsslookup.com.
-   If all else fails, you can also just try some random URLs. This
    works more often than you think. You can use Jim’s list of
    semi-standard feed URLs for inspiration.