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.
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Am I supposed to include the entire post in the description field? Or just a summary?
Lots of folks just include everything up until a reasonable character limit like 1000 characters. I think most feed readers will cut long descriptions short.
It is best practice to include an intentional separate summary. I write a sentence into my metadata for this. I try to answer “how would I describe this article if I sent it to a colleague?”
How do I handle the markup and formatting of the post?
The content should be HTML, and should generally only contain what would go in the main “content” tag in an accessible website. (Be sure not to include site navigation, page footer, etc)
Am I supposed to delete items from the feed or do I just keep appending items to the bottom of it?
I just keep adding crap until the end over time.
Technically, I clean it up, occasionally, because my RSS feeds and best of my blog links are built from the same metadata.
Its it good practice to include a thumbnail image or anything with the item in the feed?
Yes, it’s a good practice. People like images.
How is that possible
A valid HTML image tag anywhere in the RSS will typically be rendered in a reader.
Some RSS specifications include a place to specify a preferred image. Readers vary in how they use this image, but will typically feature it prominently. (Because people like images.)
Traditionally, this image should be particularly relevant to the content, and should also actually be included in the page content. (I feel like this rarely happens, though!)
Most feed readers will simply choose the first image they find on the page, if nothing is specified in the specific image RSS field. This often gets weird, especially on websites with prominent ads.
How do I distribute the feed beyond adding a button on my site?
https://mastofeed.org/ can automatically post your RSS feed links to your Mastodon account, if you’re into that sort of thing.
That said, I don’t actually want more blog readers, I just think the RSS spec is interesting. So take my advice on gaining readership with a huge dose of salt.
Thank you so much for your advice.
You’re welcome! Thanks for helping keep the RSS torch alive, and happy blogging!
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?
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.
How do I distribute the feed beyond adding a button on my site?
Some feed readers have the ability to auto-detect the RSS feed, if the site offers one. As an example, if your blog is located at https://mybloggingsite.com and the RSS feed can be accessed on a separate route (e.g.
/feed), you can add the following somewhere under the<head>tag:<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="https://mybloggingsite.com/feed">I’d recommend doing this in combination with adding a visible button, so that users can access/subscribe to the feed using either option.
Mine uses php to populate the xml file with the most recent seven posts. This means I never have to manually add or remove anything.
I don’t recommend using the full post body as the description, either a blurb or the first paragraph should be fine.
If you want, I can send you my file, both raw php and final result.
I would really appreciate if you could DM me your feed xml as an example.
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