IE7 is shipping soon, how's your auto-discovery code?
by Rick • Filed under Optimize • October 09, 2006
As Don points out, IE7 is just around the corner. It will likely be available for download from Microsoft.com in the next two weeks, and soon after it will be pushed to hundreds of millions of desktops via Windows Automatic Update. What’s this mean for you? Among other things, it means that the potential audience for your feed is going to grow very quickly.
IE7 includes a dedicated feed reader, which means that all of those copies of IE7 will have the ability to subscribe to your feed, if you have properly set up your auto-discovery code. Your auto-discovery code should look something like this:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://www.yourdomain.com/feed/" />
If that code is inserted between the
and tags in your pages, IE7 (and any other browser that supports auto-discovery) will see the feed immediately and simplify the process of subscribing to your feed.One note for FeedBurner publishers as you check your auto-discovery setup: If you are redirecting your feed(s) to your FeedBurner feed, the feed URL you include in the autodiscovery tag can be either your URL or FeedBurner’s. If you are not redirecting, and you want to ensure we track as many of your readers as possible, make sure to use your FeedBurner feed in the auto-discovery code.
More information: Modifying your autodiscovery with Blogger (FeedBurner forums), Original post on RSS auto-discovery (Dive Into Mark), IE7 RSS Publisher’s Guide (Microsoft)
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