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Celtnet Information:

How to Display your RSS Feed and a Home icon on the Address Bar

I'm sure that you've noted all those websites who have an RSS icon indicating that they have an RSS feed available in your browser's address bar. Or you may have seen a backwards-turning arrow such as this one homepage indicator address bar icon indicating that you can click on it to return to the site's homepage. All the major and professional websites seem to be using these shortcuts these days. Believe it or not, you could have them on your site too. All you need is some very simple HTML commands, as I'll explain below.

An example is given below:

Adding an RSS button:

Assuming that you have an RSS newsfeed that you want to make available (you can learn how to make one here). Then you can use the simple steps below to add an RSS indicator to the browser's Address Bar. (If you don't have an RSS feed and don't want to serve one then simply skip to the next section).

What you actually need to do is to add a link to your RSS feed, normally a file called something like feed.rss, between the <head> and </head> tags at the top of the web pages where you want to make the RSS feed visible (it is usually placed just before the </head> tag).

<LINK REL="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" 
  title="Celtnet Information: Top Stories" 
  href="http://www.celtnet.org.uk/info/info.rss" />

If you only have a single feed then simply copy this code to every page where you want to make the feed visible. However, this code also means that you can serve several RSS feeds from your website. I personally serve two: one for my main website and one for the information site you're on now. (Remember that all the code above should be on one line in your HTML file.)

Adding a Home/Return Button:

The technique for creating your home/return button is very similar to that for adding an RSS feed button. Essentially you place a single line of code between the <head> and </head> tags at the top of all your web pages. (It is usually placed just before the </head> tag.)

<LINK title="Return to Celtnet Home Page" rel="home" 
  href="http://www.celtnet.org.uk/" />

Assuming that you've done everything correctly then you will have transformed what a visitor to your site sees in their address bar from this:

To this:

If you've followed the very simple instructions above then you will have added two more professional-looking elements to your website.

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