Publishers: Industry Support

Though syndication feeds are becoming widespread at many different kinds of sites, they achieved their level of popularity today through their use in weblogging. If you haven't been exposed to weblogging, this is a type of site where entriesmost often created by one authorare listed out as they are created in reverse chronological order. Rather than entire articles, weblog entries tend to be personal jottings or updates of information, which may or may not include links to other online material.

Weblogs and syndication feeds tend to mirror each other in basic functionality. In fact, it's difficult to say which was the driving force behind dated, timelimited, reverse-ordered entries: weblogging or feeds. Regardless, all weblogging tools provide built-in functionality to generate feeds in one or more formats. Taking a look at several of these tools:

Blogger:

The granddaddy of hosted weblogging environments, Blogger still accounts for a significant percentage of weblogs. It originated as a separate entity, but is now owned by Google. Blogger provides only Atom as a builtin feed type, though if you're a Blogger Pro account holder, you can also select RSS 2.0. At this time, RSS 1.0 is not supported.

Six Apart:

Six A part currently supports three weblogging tools: the self-hosted Movable Type, with default templates supporting Atom and RSS 2.0; the hosted high-end weblogging tool TypePad, which supports RSS 2.0 and Atom; and the very popular LiveJournal, which also supports only RSS 2.0 and Atom. Unfortunately, the company references RSS 2.0 as just "RSS," which can be confusing, considering there are older legacy uses of RSS 0.9x still in usenot to mention RSS 1.0. However, when you see RSS in regard to any of these three products, know that this is RSS 2.0.

WordPress:

WordPress provides support for all three major syndication feed formatsRSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atomin addition to some legacy formats, such as RSS 0.9x.

ExpressionEngine:

pMachine's ExpressionEngine provides support for all three major syndication feeds.

Blosxom:

Blosxom has several plugins that support RSS 1.x, RSS 2.0, Atom, and the RSS 3.0 format, a pure text-based, non-XML syndication feed that was created more as an object lesson in feed design than for actual use.

TextPattern:

Though the FAQ says that TextPattern supports only RSS 0.92, it also provides support for RSS 2.0 and Atom. I can find no evidence that it supports RSS 1.0. As with Six Apart, "RSS" is assumed to be RSS 2.0, though "feed" seems to refer to RSS 0.92.

Drupal:

More of a full-featured CMS (Content Management System) than a weblogging tool, Drupal provides support for Atom, RSS 1.0, and RSS 2.0, as well as RSS 0.92 in its core implementation.

Userland:

Userland features a group hosting tool, Manila, and a personal tool, Radio. Both support RSS 2.0 and Atom.

JournURL:

JournURL, a hosted environment with extensive community functionality, supports RSS 2.0 only.

PHP-Nuke:

Another community-based tool, PHP-Nuke has modules and generators that support RSS 1.0, Atom, and RSS 2.0.

And so on. As you can see, most tools provide support for RSS 2.0 and Atom, and several provide it for RSS 1.0, in addition to some other widely used legacy formats, such as RSS 0.92.

If your tool supports one format and you want to provide support for others, you have a couple of options. First, there are third-party modules, plugins, and other add-ins that can be added to your tool to provide support for the syndication feed format. The best way to find these is to query your favorite search engine for the type of syndication feed (such as "RSS 2.0"), with the name of the tool and the type of extension supported by the tool (such as "plugin"). This should return pages with discussion about additions.

Also check with support forums, and within any online documentation.

Another option to provide support for syndication formats is to use services that convert a feed from one format to another. The site 2rss.com will generate an RSS 2.0 feed given one formatted as Atom. However, use caution with sites such as this: they have been known to insert ads into feeds.

There is also software you can run at your site if you're running a self-hosted system that can convert the syndication format using a variety of techniques, such as XSLT, or even accessing the data in the database directly. In most cases, though, the syndication format supported by your tool should be supported by syndication feed aggregators, and as long as the feed is valid, the type of feed format shouldn't make a difference to your readers.

Once you've got your feed, you want to provide a way for people to subscribe to you. There are two different ways to do this, and both are discussed in the next section.