This is a follow-up to another RSS post I have. Once you’ve created an RSS feed for your site you should create an auto-discovery link for it so that browsers and RSS readers can find it. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Go to pretty much any blog with a feed (in a somewhat recent browser) and you’ll see a little RSS icon in the address bar or toolbar if the browser auto-detected the feed. Here’s an example from Firefox 2:
Here’s IE7 (when the little star thingy appears, it’s found a feed):
Browsers and readers know the feed is there because in the <head> of the page there is a <link> tag telling it the feed is there.
It looks like this:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="My Site's RSS Feed" href="http://mysite.com/feed/" />
Of course, you could just hard-code the tag into your Rails layout, but that’s not a good idea. A better idea is to use the Rails’ auto_discovery_link_tag view helper to do it. The helper method docs can be found in the ActionView::Helpers::AssetTagHelper module.
What you end up with is something that looks like:
<%= auto_discovery_link_tag(:rss, {:controller => "controller_name", :action => "feed", :title => "My Site's RSS Feed"}) %>
See the docs for the full details.
There are other helpful methods on that module too. There’s a method for creating stylesheet links and methods for creating paths to javascript files and images.