Just like anything else in the high-tech industry, the standards for RSS are evolving quickly. For now, most programs which generate feeds seem to have settled on RSS 2.0, though RSS 0.9x and RSS 1.x variants are still around. There’s also a similar standard called Atom, which is used by Blogger and some of the other blog services. Most feed readers will understand and display all of these different formats, and will in fact deal with Atom feeds even though the programs are called “RSS” feed readers.

Many blog software packages and other tools will generate RSS feeds for several standards simultaneously. For example, WordPress generates RSS 2.0, Atom and RSS 0.9x feeds simultaneously, providing a different URL for each standard, as well as an “auto-discovery” mechanism for feed readers which are capable of figuring out which one to use and where to find it. FeedBurner, a free feed enhancer and re-publisher, will take in a live feed created for one standard and put out the same content in multiple feeds for multiple standards (depending upon the needs of the readers who subscribe to your feed through FeedBurner).

To help those of us who create feeds, there’s a free service called FeedValidator which tells you whether the feed you’re generating conforms to all of the rules of a particular standard or not. Some feed readers, feed directories and search engines will only accept properly-formatted feeds while others don’t seem to care.

The bottom line is that this is an easily-solvable problem: just use a program or service which provides your feed to the world in a variety of standard formats.

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