Benoit J - My mostly tech blog

RSS, the best way to publish posts, and give control to your readers

2024-04-09

So you’ve got a new shiny blog, or an old one, here is what I find important about RSS.

it’s the simplest way to automate notifications to regular readers
You give control to your readers, they choose how they read, when they read and in the format they read.
Some users use RSS not just for blogs, but for watching Youtube, peertube, reading Reddit, Slashdot, and more. They build a one stop shop for reading and watching medias.
It does not help discoverability, there are other options for that:
- Other people’s recommendations (this is one of my favorite way)
- blog rolls, blog rings (see craftering for an example)
- RSS aggregator (planet emacs, planet clojure, etc…)
- (In)frequent message on fedi about your new shiny posts

Use a RSS web validator to confirm your feed is valid.
Include your complete post in your feed instead of just the title. It’s way better for your reader not to have to go to your website to read your post. There are some workarounds for web based readers, but it’s not accessible, not portable for text readers and not always compatible.
Enable discoverability of your feed from your website. You can do so by adding a <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Example Feed" href="http://example.com/feed/" /> to your <html><head>...</head> tag. This will allow RSS readers to find your feed automatically by just looking at the index page of your site. You can have multiple <link> if you have multiple feeds.
Subscribe to your own feed, this way you will find out if it’s working as expected. This has the added benefit to get you used to RSS if you’re not already using it.
Make sure you do not move your posts / change URLs all the time. Use HTTP redirect if you want to move things. That is even more important with RSS feeds.
Make sure your RSS feed url is the same, use HTTP redirect if you want to move things.