Molly’s been busy lately. Not only has she been interviewing the father of CSS, she’s also found time to put together a table of syndication link locations.
This is in response to the question, "Where is your feed?".
There are a number of issues here. One, of course, is the placement of the link. How visible should it be? What should it look like? Where should it reside on the page; the top, the bottom, the side?
The other issue is how much explanation is provided by the link. Is a certain level of familiarity with RSS assumed? Is the word "subscription" more accurate than "syndication"?
Funnily enough, I’ve been making some changes over the last week to how I deal with feeds on this site.
Up ‘till recently, I only offered an RSS feed for my journal entries. Since becoming a more active netizen recently, I’m now also offering feeds for my Del.icio.us links, my Flickr photos, my Upcoming events and a FeedBurner mish-mash feed.
I’ve listed these feeds under the heading "Subscribe". I agree with Molly that this is a more widely-understood term than "Syndication".
I’ve added a title attribute to each link with the text "copy the location of this link and paste it into a newsreader".
The title text could be easily missed though, so I’ve added another step for anyone who clicks on the links. A little DOM script intercepts the click and cancels the default action (displaying the raw feed). Instead, a pop-up up window is spawned, giving a short explanation of RSS and newsreaders.
This solution isn’t as thorough as simply providing a link to an explanation page but it is nice and discrete. Visitors familiar with RSS will know what to do. Visitors unfamiliar with the format will soon find out.