Making Your Photoblog Play Well with Others
From PhotoblogsWiki
Many standards have been developed over the years that allow visitors to access your photoblog and interact with it in different ways. The goal of Photoblogs.org is to take advantage of these widely-adopted standards and use them to help new visitors find your site. If your site doesn't incorporate these standards, then you may be limiting the options available to your current and potential viewership.
Contents |
The Basics
If you want your site to play well with feed readers and services like Photoblogs.org, make sure you have...
An RSS or Atom Feed
This is absolutely critical. Feeds have become a very important communication tool between photoblogs and their readers.
A Valid RSS/Atom Feed
If your feed doesn't validate properly, then services like Photoblogs.org might have trouble reading it. (Photoblogs.org tries to read broken feeds, but it can't read every possible broken feed. If your feed is well-formed, then there should be no problems.)
Feed Autodiscovery
Feed Autodiscovery makes it possible for services like Photoblogs.org to easily find your feed. If we can't find your feed, then it's almost like it doesn't exist.
Images in Your Feed
If you don't have images in your feed, then Photoblogs.org will not be able to show any thumbnails from your site.
Full-Sized Images or Large Thumbnails in Your Feeds
Some photoblogs have very small thumbnails (like 50 pixels big.) These are better than having no images, but the larger the thumbnail, the better. We suggest that you have large thumbnails that are no smaller than 240 pixels on the longest side. Of course, if you'd rather not have thumbnails and just want full-sized images (somewhere around 750 pixels), that's perfectly fine, too. Photoblogs.org can resize a full-sized image down to a thumbnail.
For Photoblog Software Developers
There are many things that software developers can do to make their programs interact better with services like Photoblogs.org. Here are a few guidelines...
Feed Needs to Point to that Blog's Homepage URL
Every feed is meant to point back to the homepage of the blog that it represents. This is what the pointer should look like in RSS and Atom respectively...
- for RSS: <link>http://www.example.com/home_directory_of_blog/</link>
- for Atom: <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.example.com/home_directory_of_blog/" />
If your blog software doesn't have this implemented correctly, then it will confuse all kinds of feed readers and search engines. Services like Photoblogs.org use the <link> tag and Feed Autodiscovery to not only determine the location of blogs and feeds, but also to determine which feeds belong to which blogs.
Use Image Enclosures in Feeds!
Every photoblog should output images in enclosures (and preferably big images.) Photoblogging should be just like Podcasting!
Meta Data in Control Panel Should be Tied to Feeds
Photoblog users need a simple control panel that allows them to change the following information about their blog. When a user updates these fields, this information should be automatically reflected in their RSS/Atom feeds. Photoblogs.org grabs this important meta data from each blog's feed and uses it to automatically update their photoblog profile. These are the main RSS/Atom feed fields that should be configurable by the user:
- Title
- Copyright
- Description
- Site URL - All RSS/Atom feeds point to their blog's homepage URL using a <link> tag. This URL needs to be configurable by the user in case they want to change the location of their site. Photoblogs.org uses this field to determine the official homepage of the photoblog. If this value is changed by the user, Photoblogs.org will use this to automatically update their homepage URL in their photoblog profile.
Control Panel Option for Feed Size
All blog software should allow users to easily set the number of items that they show in their feed. By default this should be set to around 10 or 15 items, but the user should be able to set it to any reasonable number they want.
Comment Feeds
All blogging software should allow for RSS/Atom feeds of comments. This allows users to follow a conversation on a particular blog post in their feed readers. It will also allow services like Photoblogs.org to read this information and do some very helpful things with it in the future.
Use a Standard 404 when a Site is Gone
If you run a photoblog hosting service and one of your users gets rid of (or loses) their account, it's best to make sure that your server returns a standard 404 error. If an account is gone and your server doesn't return a 404 in the HTTP header, then services like Photoblogs.org won't know that the site has been deleted. If you do return a 404, then Photoblogs.org will be able to automatically delete the listing from our database. See also: Photoblogs.org Bot
Use Standard HTTP Redirect Codes when Sites Move
If you run a photoblog hosting service and you want to give your users the ability to change their URLs, it's best to send a standard redirect code in the header of the old site that points to the new site. If you do this, then services like Photoblogs.org will be able to automatically perform URL changes for your users. See also: Photoblogs.org Bot, Changing Your URL
More about Photoblogs.org
The following documents will also help you to understand how Photoblogs.org works and how it interacts with blogs.
This document will continue to grow as more standards are developed and widely adopted.
If you are a developer and have any questions about this, feel free to contact Brandon. He'll be happy to work with you to develop common standards that will make things easier for all photobloggers.
