I recently stumbled across the blog of Mike Davidson – I can’t remember how – and while there are plenty of interesting articles there, the one that caught my eye was about people not using syndication feeds. Apparently many readers just visit a blog every now and then to check for new content, unaware that RSS and Atom feeds exist.
Mike’s solution is beautifully simple: add a message at the top of the page explaining that feeds are available and what they do. I liked it enough to turn it into a TextPattern plugin. You can grab it with Git:
git clone http://barkingiguana.com/~craig/syndication_notice.git/
Installation is straightforward, if a bit spartan on documentation at the moment. You’ll need to modify TextPattern’s publish/rss.php and publish/atom.php scripts for proper feed integration – specifically, append ?source=feed to the end of each href. If there’s demand, I’ll write up more detailed instructions for the next release.