chrispederick.com

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.