Feed Autodiscovery
From PhotoblogsWiki
Feed Autodiscovery is a way to tell everyone where your blog's feeds are. If your website doesn't use Feed Autodiscovery, then it may be difficult or impossible for feed readers and search engine spiders (such as Photoblogs.org) to locate your feeds.
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How does it work?
Your blog and your feeds exist in separate locations. If a spider knows where your blog is, it doesn't necessarily know where your feeds are, so you need to specify the location. The way to communicate this is through a bit of special text within the <head></head> of your blog. A spider will look for this text, understand what it means, then know how to find your feeds.
What does it look like?
The most common way to do this is with the use of the <link> tag. These tags need to be within the <head></head> of your website.
RSS Autodiscovery
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS Feed" href="http://www.example.com/rss.xml" />
You will need to change the http://www.example.com/rss.xml URL to point to your own feed.
Atom Autodiscovery
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom Feed" href="http://www.example.com/atom.xml" />
You will need to change the http://www.example.com/atom.xml URL to point to your own feed.
Putting Multiple Feeds in Order
Your blog may have multiple feeds. For example, it could have an RSS feed and an Atom feed. If this is the case, it's perfectly fine to have <link> tags for each of the feeds. Keep in mind, though, that the order of the <link> tags is important. If you would rather have people use your RSS feed, then put it first. If you would rather have people use your Atom feed, then put that first. Many feed readers and search engine spiders will only care about the first feed that you have listed.
Blogging Services
If you're using a popular blogging host or blogging software, then they should handle all of this for you. Most bloggers don't need to know or care about Feed Autodiscovery... It should just work. Unfortunately, that's not always the case, so hopefully this document will be helpful for some of you. ;)
Why can't Photoblogs.org find my feeds?
If Feed Autodiscovery is properly implemented on your blog, then Photoblogs.org should be able to find it. Once you've made sure that everything is in place, visit the Photoblogs.org Add/Update page and enter your URL. Photoblogs.org should automatically find your feeds and update your profile.
If Photoblogs.org still doesn't find your feeds, then check for the following...
Make Sure Your Pages Validate
Webpages that don't validate are basically "broken." These broken pages can cause problems for feed readers and search engine spiders. It's best to make sure that your website and feeds validate properly. If your pages validate, then Photoblogs.org should be able to read them. (Photoblogs.org actually tries its hardest to read broken pages, but sometimes it isn't successful.)
If you're having problems with Photoblogs.org, you can enter your URLs into the following forms. They will show you any validation errors that you can fix:
Read more about the W3C Markup Validation Service.
Make Sure You're Not Using Framesets
There are services out there that allow you to make it look like your blog is at a different URL. Many of these services do this by using framesets. Unfortunately, this can cause problems for many feed readers and search engines, because your website still exists at the old URL and only appears to exist at the new one.
If you must have your website within a frameset, you'll need to put your Feed Autodiscovery <link> tags within the page of the outermost frameset for Photoblogs.org to access it. (Many search engines will not dig deeper into framesets to find your Feed Autodiscovery code.)
References
- RSS Autodiscovery (Dive into Mark)
- RSS Autodiscovery Update (Dive into Mark)
- Atom Autodiscovery Spec
