Detecting RSS

Setting up a bare-bones RSS feed for this blog ended up not being too tedious, and I'll probably write in more detail about that later. One thing I wanted to document before I forget about it, though, is how I got the RSS feed to be detected by Vivaldi (and, I hope, any other app that detects feeds).

As it turns out, you can use link tags to do this, like so:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="A Blog Is All It Is" href="/rss-feed.xml">

The key here is setting the rel attribute to alternative, which has the following description on MDN:

Alternate representations of the current document.

Handy!

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a Reddit comment was where I found this recommendation:

See if this works in the <head></head>

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Title of Feed" href="url-to-feed" />

I'm not sure what it says about the state of search engines that Reddit is where I found this. It seems like using <link> tags in this way is standard. When I type in link into WebStorm a bunch of auto-completes (driven by Emmet, I think) pop up, including for RSS and Atom. And at the very least you'd think the MDN docs I linked above would appear prominently in the search result.