chrispederick.com
Feed Tidying
- General
- 2 Comments
- 3 years ago on April 6, 2005
After reading Molly Holzschlag’s post about how feeds are referenced on blogs I decided to do some tidying of how I handle them on chrispederick.com.
Previously I had three feeds - somewhat cryptically named ‘Blog: RSS’, ‘Blog: Atom’ and ‘Comments: RSS’ - and they were all linked from the sidebar under a ‘Feeds’ heading as well as automatically discoverable.
Changes
The first change was replacing the ‘Feeds’ heading with ‘Subscribe’, as I agree with Molly that this is probably the “most globally understood” term.
Next, I wanted to improve the naming of the individual subscribe links. Displaying the feed formats - RSS and Atom - was unnecessarily technical, but removing them would leave two ‘Blog’ links, so the solution I chose was to standardize on a particular format. Nearly every feed reader now supports both formats so limiting to one did not seem like a big issue. I probably would have gone with Atom as my format of choice, but by default Wordpress does not come with an Atom feed for comments so I chose RSS for simplicity.
Removing ‘Blog: Atom’ allowed me to remove the feed formats and left me with ‘Blog Posts’ and ‘Blog Comments’ as the subscribe links. I also decided to add a couple of extra feeds that had previously not been exposed - one for the forums and one for my cameraphone photos.
Finally, I used some mod_rewrite rules to make all of the feed locations clean and consistent as well as redirecting to these new locations for those using the old feeds.
The only thing that I still want to look into is adding some instructional text for the subscribe links. Whether that will be an entire page solution such as Dave Shea or a more discrete technique as employed by Jeremy Keith (or a combination of both) I have not yet decided.
The Atom feed is still available for those who are already subscribed to it. I am no longer exposing the feed, but it will continue to be updated.
2 Comments
Thanks for the tip - I’ll try and fix this tonight.
I’m used to IE working differently from Firefox with CSS applied to HTML, but I’m kind of surprised it also behaves differently with CSS applied to XML.
Asimov
3 years ago
April 8, 2005
Hello,
I have just checked on IE and your css on xml isn’t working 100%. I’m not a speciliast but in order to have the same result I have had to place content\:encoded and wfw\:commentRSS for IE to apply correctly the css on your XML document.
Feel free to comment.
Asimov