Being news reader friendly

Andrew Grumet makes an interesting point about using CSS in blog posts. I often find myself make style declarations inline when I want to position images etc in my blog posts. I like his idea.

On a related theme, I often see broken images when viewing RSS feeds in news readers — once upon a time I had the very same problem in my feed. The reason: relative URLs.

For example, let’s take the image of myself. If you looked at the HTML for this particular image you would see something like this: <img src=”/images/me.jpg”/>. Works fine in a browser but try it in a news reader and … broken image. To view the image in a news reader the link should be: <img src=”http://simonbuckle.com/images/me.jpg”/>; notice the inclusion of the (full) domain name. Perhaps that’s another idea for a WordPress plugin: for each blog post add the domain name to any relative URLs to avoid things like broken image links.

In summary: check how your feed looks in a news reader! Your readers will thank you or, at the very least, you won’t look like a dumbass.

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