How to add RSS Autodiscovery to your site

June 15, 2005

I sometimes see web sites or blogs that have RSS feeds, but fail to include the one line of HTML that enables RSS autodiscovery. Even some well known blogs such as 37 Signals - Signal Vs Noise omit the feature. Jason Kottke's blog has autodiscovery support on the main page, but not on his entry pages.

Adding that one line of code to your template will make it easier for people to subscribe to your RSS feed. Here's how:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" 
  title="RSS Feed for petefreitag.com" 
  href="/rss/" />

The above link tag should be added inside the head tag of your HTML document.

You will of course need to change the value of the title and href attributes to fit your needs.

If your feed is an ATOM feed you will want to change the type to application/atom+xml.

If you have multiple feeds for the url you can just specify multiple link tags.

When you enable autodiscovery for your rss feed it allows browsers and aggregators to automatically detect the RSS feed when your browsing, and it makes it easy for the user to subscribe to it. Both FireFox, and Safari 2.0 support autodiscovery of RSS feeds out of the box, here's what it looks like when you find one:

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add to del.icio.us | Tags: rss, autodiscovery, html, atom, blogs

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Comments

That's awesome I wondered why mine wasn't working, thanks Pete!

by freaksauce on 06/15/2005 at 7:30:12 PM UTC

The trailing slash is illegal according to the w3 validator.

by Michael Dinowitz on 06/15/2005 at 10:12:58 PM UTC

Michael - The trailing slash on the link tag is required if your document type is XHTML, if your doctype is HTML 4.0 then you should not have the closing slash on the tag.

by Pete Freitag on 06/16/2005 at 10:27:21 AM UTC

I do not see the RSS icon on Firefox, when I go here, for example: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-adv/rss/front.htm i.e., I don't see any autodiscovery for it. On your website, and on the WSJ feed website, I do see the auto-discovery icon on Firefox. I know how to subscribe when the icon is there but how does one subscribe when the icon is not present.

by M. Mortazavi on 10/07/2005 at 9:18:48 PM UTC

yeah, I use the same trick too :)

by naser on 11/19/2005 at 11:03:21 AM UTC

Hi, I inserted the above code in the index.html of my site http://www.search-wiz.info but nothing happened. If you have time look at the site and click on view source and you'll see the code, but nothing is appearing on the page. I'm new at this, but isn't the graphic above supposed to show up on the page somewhere? And, if so, how do you control where it is going to show up on your page, by just pasting the code between the head tags? Obviously I'm confused. Help...Ray

by Ray Corbett on 04/04/2006 at 11:30:55 AM UTC

We need more people like you educating - Great article! http://runstream.com

by Runstream on 06/20/2007 at 8:07:55 PM UTC

Great! Remarkable, I've implemented it and it works.

by suray on 06/24/2007 at 7:34:28 PM UTC

Is it working for Windows Live Spaces !

by LeoTheMaster on 06/25/2007 at 3:02:42 AM UTC

I want to say - thank you for this!

by celexa on 06/29/2007 at 7:57:57 PM UTC

Guys, Here's an easy way to generate your own autodiscovery tags: http://www.feedest.com/toolAutodiscovery.cfm Hope this helps.

by Feedst on 07/11/2007 at 11:16:05 AM UTC

This works on Netscape and fire fox but not on internet explorer

by Roman on 08/15/2007 at 9:23:16 AM UTC

Thank you.

by Debi Winters on 08/24/2007 at 2:48:48 PM UTC

So how do we know which format of feeds were currently using? On Wordpress I'm running 2.3 'dexter' what feed is this? www.blogindiversity.com

by Alex R. on 10/08/2007 at 10:33:02 AM UTC

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by cams4life on 10/08/2007 at 11:03:18 PM UTC

Hello Pete, I really appreciate the information. I working with the DotNetNuke module and I am hoping that this option is available within the module. They have not got back to me yet about that but if not I put in a request to see if it could be added to the module it would definitely be an asset. New on the Blog Scene, Carla Backmon http://www.savvmari.com

by Carla Backmon on 10/17/2007 at 2:49:23 PM UTC

Thanks a lot for this tip! Been looking for this for quite some time. As we use Joomla! - and this doesn't seem to be enabled by default this hint was really useful! Cheers! www.memotrek.com/blog/

by MemoTrek Blogger on 11/11/2007 at 4:54:40 PM UTC

Thank you.

by Debi Winters on 04/05/2008 at 3:35:26 PM UTC

Thank you for the useful advice!

by David Hepworth on 04/10/2008 at 9:16:23 PM UTC

Hi, Can any one help me with making RSS autodiscoverable when rss is present in iframe of the page????

by Kunal on 04/27/2008 at 3:48:00 AM UTC

My recent post is not being updated. I can update my thumbshots but not my posts. And i have been trying for more than a week now. It just keeps saying Last Crawl: Error on whatever date it crawled. I am new at this stuff so can you explain it in layman's terms how I can update my posts. Thank you so much!

by Tamela on 07/17/2008 at 12:21:52 PM UTC

I am not sure how to add this to my site. I just changed the template and I am having trouble understanding exactly where to place this code.

by Viv on 08/27/2008 at 9:58:24 AM UTC

Thanks Pete, I'll add it to my website to see if it can be discovered.

by Daniel Hunt on 11/07/2008 at 1:16:05 PM UTC

How did I miss this? Worked first time, thank you :-)

by David S on 11/30/2008 at 6:16:59 AM UTC

an excellent explanation and wonderful blog:)

by domredsea on 01/23/2009 at 9:13:18 AM UTC

Ow yea! I got working RSS both on Fire fox and IE7. Booya! http://www.epiclosers.com/

by Alex on 03/12/2009 at 1:56:10 AM UTC

it works for fine with me, :) thank you so much....

by noah on 07/17/2009 at 5:20:18 PM UTC

Thank you for your good advice.

by 2proo on 08/02/2009 at 5:17:21 AM UTC

lol, why does Google help link here? I mean I understand that this blog post helps, but it's just kinda odd (at least for a large company like Google).

by AcrylicStyle.Com on 08/08/2009 at 6:06:38 AM UTC

So where it says:

title="RSS Feed for petefreitag.com"
href="/rss/" />

I should put my site name and my feedburner URL after the href=?

I am on blogger.

by Shan @ Last Shreds Of Sanity on 09/29/2009 at 3:58:34 AM UTC

How do I tell if my WP site: www.longrad.com has XHTML or HTML 4.0, i.e. how do I know if I need closing slash on the tag or not?

by Longrad on 11/06/2009 at 4:40:35 AM UTC