Best Practices for RSS Publishers

On Friday, I got a chance to meet Niall Kennedy. Actually, we were on the same flight, to the same meeting, but I didn’t know who he was until the meeting. Whoops!
So I started catching up on his blog, and I found a link to a page that is a RSS Publisher’s guide. Being that I own the Feed Detector component in the current Windows Live Toolbar, I find this entry to be valuable - and I hope everyone reads it:

Microsoft Team RSS Blog : Windows RSS Publisher’s Guide (work-in-progress)

Best Practices

The following is a collection of best practices (do’s and don’ts) for how to leverage RSS autodiscovery in your web pages.

DO choose good titles

As you can see in the example above, IE will display the title as you write it in your page. Therefore, it’s a good idea to actually put the title of the feed right there. A few sites we’ve seen have “RSS” as their title.

DON’T list the same feed in different formats

Unless you have a really good reason, it’s not a good idea to have two links (or three!) that provide the same feed in different formats. It just makes the user have to pick between two things that they are not capable of distinguishing between. Pick your favorite format, and just support that.

DO put your most relevant feed first

You are always welcome to put as many feeds as you want in your header, but you should make sure that the one at the top is the one that’s most relevant to the page itself. In IE7 Beta 2 Preview, we have optimized for the most common scenario of having a single feed by making the first (or only) feed in the list one-click away. Getting to that first (or only) feed in the list will be one-click away. Getting to the others will be one or two more clicks.

DO continue providing links to your feed(s) in your web page

There’s no harm in continuing to provide ordinary to your feeds in the web page. In many cases, you can provide a more descriptive text than you can fit in the link element. Whether the user clicks on the Web Feeds button or the user clicks on one of those links, IE will recognize that’s it is a feed and display it properly. Additionally, in some cases — for example, sites with lots of feeds — it’s probably best to simply provide links to those in a list on the page instead of putting two dozen feeds in the header.

Whoops! Looks like my blog is only partially compliant as I offer both ATOM and RSS. Fixed! Now it is RSS only.
If you operate a site that offers Feeds, could you please take some time to follow these best practices?

Thanks!