Syndication generally means a way for people to subscribe to your blog or content and be notified of an update automatically. Some or all of the updated content is displayed in a stripped-down, standardized format.
This generally happens with a format like RSS or Atom. For a more complete description of the the two, see WhatIsIt from our workshop last year. The Atom spec has reached 1.0 status in that time and is quickly becoming the favorite format for syndication due to it's stricter standards and better metadata. For a complete breakdown of RSS vs Atom see this wiki page.
Feed Icons
Whenever possible, using a standardized feed icon is a good idea. Microsoft adopted the Firefox feed icon with the release of Internet Explorer 7, visual consistency and use of this icon is improving. Many formats for the feed icon and more info can be found at: http://www.feedicons.com/
Auto Discovery
Firefox has been doing auto-discovery of feeds since it's debut as a 1.0 product, with a feature known as Live Bookmarks. Safari 2.0 in OS X 10.4 does RSS as well (though it doesn't use the standard RSS icon). Internet Explorer 7 from Microsoft also does feed auto-discovery and has a built-in news reader.
Internet Explorer's inclusion of a RSS reader is an important one because of it's large share of the browsing marketplace. Since IE7's release in October 2006, we've seen it's share of IE visits on walkerart.org climb from 0% to around 33% of our visits. Note that IE makes up about 50% of our total visitors to walkerart.org sites, with Safari and Firefox picking up the rest. With so many more people having a RSS reader builtin to their browser, there is potential in getting them to use it.
Auto discovery allows for a browser to automatically detect when a site has a feed or multiple feeds and show the user in some standardized way outside of the browser viewport. Here are some examples:
Firefox Feed Indicator
Safari Feed Indicator
Internet Explorer 7 Feed Indicator
To make feeds reliably auto-discoverable, there is a standardized format for linking them in the <head> of a page. Here is an example of the format:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="New Media Posts" href="http://blogs.walkerart.org/newmedia/?feed=rss2" />
You can specify multiple feeds by listing them sequentially. The order is important. The first one listed will be what Internet Explorer and Safari grab if the user just clicks the feed icon in their browser, rather than popping a menu like Firefox. In IE the clicking the icon will give them the first listed feed, the drop down arrow (see screenshot) will bring up the menu allowing them to select a feed. Safari offers no choice for multiple feeds.
