/feeds to improve feed visibility

A couple of days ago, Marcus Hermann wrote a post suggesting that blogs should expose their RSS feeds and give a human-readable introduction about what content in available through which feed on a dedicated /feeds page.

Technically, that information should already mostly be available through <link rel="alternatve"...> tags in a website’s markup, but what about things like tag-specific feeds? If a website has hundreds or even thousands of tags, it’s probably not all that user-friendly if you add a link-tag to every tag on every page 🤪

But also if your site has only one large feed, having a /feeds-page is a nice gesture, telling the visitor that you (a) don’t mind if they primarily consume their content through a feed and (b) that you’ve you’ve even thought about that use-case.

You can find my /feeds page on … /feeds🥳

At the other end of the spectrum, quite frequently, though, I now also stumble across sites that say they have/are blogs but don’t expose any RSS/Atom feed altogether; not via <link> nor with a button somewhere. In those situations I’ve now started to just send the authors a quick mail 🙂