RSS-Feed autodiscovery trick
Everyone these day’s have a blog or a web-joint where they can write, interact and basically have some fun around. People like to design their blogs/sites according yo their own whim and taste. A simple design doesn’t take someone like Team O’ Reilly to complete. Sometimes, a simple and quick loading design has a better effect on the visitors. But designing a page with MS Frontpage or NVU is not the only thing one should do to enhance their web-experience or the quality of their site. These days a web-site is not only about a few html pages hosted on a server. Now there’s new features needed to form a properly equipped webpage. Features like syndication of rss feeds , a better use of html in the page header and improved CSS properties. Today I’m gonna talk about HTML headers, how to use them and why having a good html header really counts.
Html headers are those things that are placed between the <head> </head> section of the actual html page. Like the following for instance:
<head>
<meta content=”text/html;
charset=ISO-8859-1″
http-equiv=”content-type”><
title></title><meta
content=”N I Hossain” name=”author”>
</head>
In part 1 of my post about HTML headers I’ll discuss about RSS feed autodiscovery in a page. As many of you already know that a site without RSS these days is very rare to find. Having syndicated feeds is especially important for archive pages or personal sites because it lets the visitors subscribe to the feed without any threat of email spams which used to be quite a problem in the old day’s of mailing lists. But now, rss has come to our rescue. The autodiscovery of rss is actually a pretty nifty feature. It works in new-age browsers like Opera , Firefox and IE. What “autodiscovery of feeds” basically means is that when you point your browser to a site with syndicated-rss, the browser shows a certain object in its interface which indicates that the site is equipped with rss and one can subscribe to it. In opera and firefox(>1.o) the “autodiscovery” of rss is interpreted as ” icons” in the address-bar like -
in Opera or 
in Firefox
These two icons indicate that the page you are currently visiting has rss feeds which you can subscribe to. But the question is how to make your page pass this tricky test? At first you must have a site/blog that has an active rss feed (indicated mostly by an ornage button like this:
). After making sure that your site outputs active rss feeds, copy the link of the feed (this will end in an extension like .xml or .php). Now go to the header section of your page’s html. In between the <head> </head> section put the below code:
Doing so will make the new-age browsers realize that your site has embedded rss feeds available and also notify the page-visitor of this information. Thats all for today. Adios 
Dude, I’m definitely gonna use those header codes you suggested
Comment by failsal — November 12, 2005 @ 9:22 pm
Man, atunu….I didn’t know about this trick. I think I’ll apply it on my next submission to oswd
Comment by rafi — November 22, 2005 @ 12:54 pm