TopOfBlogs Official Blog » Development

RSS Feed Autodiscovery

admin — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 19:36:49 +0000

The most common problem people have submitting their blog to our system is not having a proper RSS feed.. The TopOfBlogs crawler will verify several things in order to ensure that you are submitting a blog and not a regular site and having a proper rss feed is just a basic thing for any type of blogging platform. Still, even if your blog has a feed and it is included somewhere on the front page, it might be very hard for our crawler to find it.

In order for our system, or any aggregator (also applies to your visitors clickig on the RSS icon in their browser’s URL field) to crawl your site you should ensure that you are advertising your feed. For this you just need to have in your head section of your HTML page (blog template) a line like:

(where obviously you will have your own feed url), or depending on your feed type, for atom:

If you have multiple feeds you can just specify multiple lines.

These links will enable RSS autodiscovery and it will allow browsers and aggregators to automatically detect your rss feed, and make it easier to subscribe in general.

Conclusion: if your submission to TopOfBlogs is failing be sure to check that you make your blog feed discoverable to our robot and other systems to help you get a better exposure for your blog.

TopOfBlogs tags

admin — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 08:59:25 +0000

We just realized that having a top generated for a tag that has only one occurrence (only one blog registered with that tag) is not useful at all. This is a waste of resources (generating a worthless page, making the tag cloud harder to read, etc.) so we decided that we will create the top only for tags that have at least 2 different blogs registered with that tag. We are still listing the single occurrence tag but as text instead of a link to the top for that tag. The moment when another blog uses the same tag it will become active and appear on the tag cloud and the top for it being generated.

Improved existing site check

admin — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 08:46:46 +0000

We have just improved the existing site check to verify upon submission if the blog already exists in our system. This was previously done at the end of the submission, but now it is the first step. This will save you from adding information and then getting an error that the site has already been registered.

If you have already a site registered at TopOfBlogs and you want to make changes, don’t try to add it again as this will fail as explained above. Instead use your account and make any changes you need from there (you will have received your username and password on the greeting email). If someone else has added your own site please contact us and we will try to help you resolve the issue.