This is a regular update my Now page. I publish them as a blog post for archive purposes. You can also view all my past now entries.
Iβve been a massive fan of RSS since the Google Reader days. So, naturally, I added feeds to my site. This week, I read an excellent post by Robb explaining how difficult it was for him to find the RSS feeds on most personal websites. Even though mine have been accessible in the nav footer, I wanted to follow his tips to make them even more discoverable.
Creating a Feeds Page
Before this, when you clicked on my RSS links, they would automatically open the feed URL in another tab, so you had to go to the address bar and copy it. I have created a dedicated Feeds page, so when you click the RSS link in the websiteβs nav, it opens this page instead. Having a page allows me to explain RSS more to people who donβt know about them. It also allows me to show my multiple feeds for different content, such as my main feed and bookmarks/links feed.
Cory Dransfeldtβs website heavily inspired the content of the page.
Exposing feeds in Webflow
I used Webflow to build my website, and exposing the feeds was very easy. In the custom code section, I went to the head code and pasted in the snippets that Robb mentioned in his article. I made sure to add both of my RSS feed URLs.
Using a shortcut to find feeds quicker
Because I face a similar problem to Robb, where I struggle to find other peopleβs RSS feed buttons, I use a shortcut to help me. Federico Vittici from Mac Stories created a shortcut that scrapes the site for its RSS feed URLs and adds them to your clipboard to easily paste them into your RSS reader of choice.
But the shortcut only works if they have correctly exposed their feeds, as Rob explains. I noticed that the shortcut was not even working on my site, but after I exposed the feeds on my pageβs header, I got it working.
{{find-rss-feeds}}
I have modified the shortcut a bit. You can download the shortcut here if interested.