I'm amazed how many people fall for blogging techniques that basically make it impossible for other people to subscribe to your blog. Today, I found out from an irate reader that he was unable to subscribe to my link blog, hosted on wordpress. It turns out that the default template for Wordpress uses the feed URI scheme in a link in the footer. The user tried to copy that link into GreatNews and of course, the RSS reader responded Invalid rss content. I can't imagine how many Wordpress users must be missing out on subs because Matt listened to such ridiculous advice.
I'm sure some readers will respond that GreatNews is the problem, not Wordpress. I just wanted to point out that the feed URI scheme doesn't work in Google Reader either. Nor does it work in IE7. I think it works in FeedDemon, but I didn't try it.
Here's a great experiment. I'd like the readers to test the feed URI scheme in my link blog. Try to subscribe with whatever RSS reader you have and report on the results. Make sure to include the feed scheme when copy/pasting the URL into your RSS reader. The RSS feed is...
feed:http://randymorin.wordpress.com/feed/
Sorry, I couldn't hyperlink the feed URI scheme. It's not supported by my editor. I would of had to edit the HTML manually to make it work. Yuck!
Worked fine in the CITA RSS Aggregator,
Andy Henderson
this textarea did however not work in konqueror, had to compile firefox to post this comment
-Hannes
Randy
-d.w.
Didn't seem to work in Bloglines, BottomFeeder, FeedExplorer, FeedReader, Google Reader, JetBrains Omea, Newsgator Online, RSS Bandit, RSSOwl, RssReader, and Thunderbird.
GreatNews kind of worked for me. When a "feed" url is copied onto the clipboard GreatNews seems to recognise it and automatically pastes the url into the subscribe dialog with the "feed" part removed. However, if you manually type in a "feed" url it will fail.
Regards
James Holderness
Randy
Mihai Parparita
Google Reader Engineer