Subscribing to My Blog

Recently I've had a couple people try to subscribe to my blog by trying to 'add a subscription' from within their reader, and it didn't work. They got back an error message saying no feed was discovered. Tonight I think I got that fixed. I was updating my blog at blogcatalog - to update my new url - when I noticed that it said my last post was on Thanksgiving. That's been a while, and I know I've posted since then. When I tried to get it to update my feed, I noticed that it came back saying:

Feed URL:

None

This isn't good! Luckily, in the same place they told me I had no feed, they also told me that BlogCatalog uses Autodiscovery to determine your Blog's RSS Feed. So, I clicked the link that said Autodiscovery, and this is what I found:

I sometimes see web sites or blogs that have RSS feeds, but fail to include the one line of HTML that enables RSS autodiscovery....

...Adding that one line of code to your template will make it easier for people to subscribe to your RSS feed. Here's how:

< link rel="alternate"
type="application/rss+xml" 
title="RSS Feed for petefreitag.com" 
href="/rss/" />

The above link tag should be added inside the head tag of your HTML document.

You will of course need to change the value of the title and href attributes to fit your needs.

So, I added the code to the head of my template, and now, when I go to Google Reader, select 'Add subscription' and type in my url, I get a feed! Hopefully this makes it easier for anyone who is trying to subscribe to my blog.