I’ve never dealt with RSS before on a personal level. I’ve pretty much always used social media to discover blog posts. I’m wanting to set up RSS for my personal blog but since I have no experience, looking for some guidance for best practices. I’m currently setting up a script to automatically update the xml when I publish new posts.
Am I supposed to include the entire post in the description field? Or just a summary? How do I handle the markup and formatting of the post?
Am I supposed to delete items from the feed or do I just keep appending items to the bottom of it?
Its it good practice to include a thumbnail image or anything with the item in the feed? How is that possible.
How do I distribute the feed beyond adding a button on my site?
Thank you in advance to anyone for their advice.
https://www.rssboard.org/rss-profile#element-channel-item-description
https://www.rssboard.org/rss-profile#namespace-elements-content
It’s your discretion if you want to include the full content. Many people consuming RSS feeds are annoyed when the full content isn’t included. I’m not sure why the other poster thinks that most RSS readers cut off content at 1000 characters.
Also, the Atom syndication standard is a widely accepted format that’s often just called RSS. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4287
Thanks for sharing that website. Thats the best I’ve seen the spec explained. I don’t monetize my blog and don’t ever intend to so I don’t see why I wouldn’t just include the full content if I can get my script to easily export a stripped down version without some of the formatting meant to make it look better on the full site.
Amusing fact, the Atom standard was created because people thought that the rss board standards for RSS weren’t described well enough.