ReedyBear's Blog

Properly Support RSS on your Website

At the bear minimum, just provide ANY feed support AT ALL, and provide markup on your home page pointing to it.

Also See: Getting Started with RSS Feed Readers and Please Ask Steam to Improve Their RSS Support

What Feeds to provide

START with your Main Feed and Category Feeds. The others are nice-to-haves but don't overwhelm yourself trying to do everything at once.

  1. Main Feed: For ALL your blog posts, ALL your news, or your most important content.
  2. Category Feeds: A separate feed for each category. For a site like NPR, this includes "National", "World", "Politics", "Health", and four others.
  3. Tag Feeds: Any hashtag-sorting feature can also provide a feed. Bear supports this. Ex: My posts tagged with #best and #book each have RSS feeds available
  4. Search Feeds: Any search result on your website can also provide an RSS feed.
  5. Multi-Tag Feeds: For example, posts with both #best and #politics tags.
  6. Feed of Available Feeds: Create a Feed (perhaps using tagged blog posts) that somebody can subscribe to, to see a list of any feeds available on your website. Call it 'Available Feeds' and add the markup to your Home Page.
  7. Email Newsletters: If you have any email newsletters, they should also be available as an RSS Feed.
  8. Social Media Posts: If you're running a public institution, such as a government or charity, social media posts should go on your website first, where a feed is made available for them, and then cross-posted to your social media. If you're not a public institution, this matters less.
  9. Events: If your organization hosts any kind of events, there should be a feed so people can see announcements.
  10. Meeting Agendas/Minutes: For charities and governments, there should be feeds for documents related to public meetings or meetings for the board and membership.

Sample Markup

This markup goes on a page to point to a feed's url, which allows Feed Reader apps to detect feeds by scanning regular web pages.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://reedybear.bearblog.dev/feed/" title="ReedyBear's Blog">  
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://reedybear.bearblog.dev/feed/?q=best" title="Best Posts | ReedyBear">

Use type="application/rss+xml" if you're using traditional RSS.

Make Feeds Accessible

Home Page Markup is the most important for existing RSS users, and Subscribe Page is most important for welcoming new people to RSS.

  1. HTML Markup: Add HTML Markup to your Home page AND any pages that have their own feeds (category pages, tag pages, etc)
  2. Featured Feeds on your Home Page: Provide markup for MULTIPLE feeds on your home page. Include your Main Feed and your most popular or most important category feeds.
  3. Subscribe Page: Create a Subscribe page that tells people how to subscribe and lists your most popular feeds' pages as regular links. Each link should ALSO be represented by the HTML markup. See my subscribe page. The Subscribe page should be featured in your site's header or navigation menu.
  4. External Feeds: GovTrack has a Posts Page on their website but ALSO has a Substack for whitehouse coverage. They should add the substack's feed to their own website's home page. If you use BlueSky, you could add your BlueSky account's feed to the home page markup.
  5. Social Media Icons/Links: Wherever you have Social Media icons on your website, you should have an RSS Icon (RSS Icon - Orange with 3 white curved strokes). This icon should link to your SUBSCRIBE page if you've made one. Typically this would be in the footer of every page on your site.
  6. Main Feed Everywhere: Provide your Main Feed's markup on every single page of your website. On Category pages, the category's feed markup should come BEFORE the main feed's markup.
  7. Related Feeds: Any page that does not have it's own feed, markup for the relevant parent page's feed should be present. A News Article likely won't have a feed, but that article's category does.
  8. NOT for download: Do not provide headers that tell the browser to DOWNLOAD the .rss feed. When somebody clicks the RSS link, they should be able to view the XML in their browser. (The downloads can be confusing and make it harder to actually get the link into your feed reader app)
  9. Only ONE type: atom is the modern version of rss. Both work. But you should only provide one because any competent feed reader supports both, AND providing both will only create confusion for users. I recommend atom, but it just doesn't really matter.
  10. 50+ Articles: Feeds should provide at least 50 articles if that many exist. This helps prevent users from missing articles, even if they don't check very often, even if their app doesn't update the feed very often.
  11. Jargon: Primarily discuss 'Feeds' and 'Feed Readers', not RSS or atom. We don't tell people to "visit my HTML page delivered over HTTPS", we say "Visit my website". So we should say "Subscribe to my feed".
  12. Styled RSS Pages: RSS Feed Pages can be styled, and those pages can instruct a user to download an RSS app and even link to a page that gives them more information about RSS. See a How To and an Example by Cassidy Williams.

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This Blog Post is dedicated to the Public Domain and I release all copyright privileges. You are free to reproduce it in any medium you like, and can even claim it as your own (though this would be rude). Attribution is appreciated, but is not required.

#code #featured #rss