Jonas Luster over at J/files posted this enormously helpful item explaining how to make RSS autodiscovery work on a blog or Web page. With autodiscovery, news aggregators such as Newz Crawler and discovery tools such as discover/it can automatically detect whether a blog has an RSS feed and, in the case of Newz Crawler, add it to your subscriptions.

But in attempting to set up autodiscovery on LawSites, I discovered what appears to be a bug in News Crawler (at least according to Jonas). The name of my RSS file is www.legaline.com/lawsites_rss.xml. For some reason, Newz Crawler refuses to detect this, even though discover/it has no problem. But, if I change the name to simply www.legaline.com/rss.xml, Newz Crawler picks it right up.

The moral: If you want your RSS feed to be detected by Newz Crawler, do not give the file a name any fancier than “rss.xml.”

Photo of Bob Ambrogi Bob Ambrogi

Bob is a lawyer, veteran legal journalist, and award-winning blogger and podcaster. In 2011, he was named to the inaugural Fastcase 50, honoring “the law’s smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries and leaders.” Earlier in his career, he was editor-in-chief of several legal publications, including The National Law Journal, and editorial director of ALM’s Litigation Services Division.