The IE7 toolbar has an RSS icon that is ordinarily grayed-out, but lights up when visiting certain web pages.

Clicking the icon displays a list of feeds available on the page. When you select a feed you see a formatted version of the feed along with options to subscribe to the feed and change the sort order of items. Once you subscribe to the feed, it gets added to the “Favorites Center” which you can open to organize your feeds or view them.

If you are a web developer and have made RSS feeds available on your web pages, you can make discovery and subscription of these feeds easier for IE7 users by adding a few elements to your page that announce the presence of the feeds. Adding a <LINK> tag to the page Head with the correct attributes will do the trick. For example, my blog has the following:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="My RSS Feed" ref="http://blogs.speerio.net/peerio/SyndicationService.asmx/GetRss" /> 

As you can see, this is quite simple; you just have to add the attributes “rel,” type,” “title,” and “ref”. This is a simple addition that will instantly make your RSS feeds easier to consume.