7 ms·

RSS Feed Best Practices

220 points by nalgeon 4y ago

rambambram 4y ago
Where's your feed icon then? ;)
- kevincox 4y ago
  Oh, feed icons. That is a good one to add!
  - rambambram 4y ago
    I want to follow your website's feed (at https://kevincox.ca/feed.atom https://kevincox.ca/feed.atom). Good article!
the_third_wave 4y ago
RSS Feed Best Practice #1: make sure your service/site/resource has a feed. Am I missing something or is this site missing one?
- mdp2021 4y ago
  > is this site missing one Which site? For the submitted one, you have to search for 'atom' in the source markup; for HN, for 'rss'. -- kevincox.ca <link href=../../../../feed.atom rel=alternate title="Blog Posts" type=application/atom+xml> HN <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="rss">
- kevincox 4y ago
  The site definitely has a feed. Although I don't have a visible link to it. I am sort of intentionally ignoring my recommendation to provide a link and RSS icon as an experiment to see how well feed discovery is supported and used. I wouldn't recommend this but I've been going back and forth with this on my personal blog as it isn't very important if the maximum number of people can find the feed. If you just paste the page into your feed reader it should find the feed for you.
  - rainworld 4y ago
    NetNewsWire seems to have a problem discovering the feed from index pages (e.g. https://kevincox.ca/2022/05/ https://kevincox.ca/2022/05/).
    - kevincox 4y ago
      Weird, the link is the same as the other pages and it on other sites: https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=https%3A%2F%2Fkevincox.ca%2F2022%2F05%2F https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=https%3A%2F%2Fke... https://feedmail.org/subscriptions/new?url=https%3A%2F%2Fkevincox.ca%2F2022%2F05%2F https://feedmail.org/subscriptions/new?url=https%3A%2F%2Fkev... However I noticed that this site also has trouble: https://discovery.thirdplace.no/?url=&q=https%3A%2F%2Fkevincox.ca%2F2022%2F05%2F https://discovery.thirdplace.no/?url=&q=https%3A%2F%2Fkevinc...
  - leephillips 4y ago
    Vivaldi discovers the feed.
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    By the way, Kevin: it may seem overly picky, but would it not be cleaner to have <link href=/feed.atom rel=alternate title="Blog Posts" type=application/atom+xml> instead of <link href=../../../../feed.atom rel=alternate title="Blog Posts" type=application/atom+xml> ?
    - kevincox 4y ago
      It could, but my site is available via IPFS so I use relative links everywhere in case a gateway is used. For example https://ipfs.io/ipns/kevincox.ca/2022/05/06/rss-feed-best-practices/ https://ipfs.io/ipns/kevincox.ca/2022/05/06/rss-feed-best-pr.... That being said with subdomain gateways being widely available now it is pretty safe to go back to absolute links as https://kevincox-ca.ipns.dweb.link/2022/05/06/rss-feed-best-practices/ https://kevincox-ca.ipns.dweb.link/2022/05/06/rss-feed-best-... handles absolute references just fine. And of course none of this matters much if you have a non-IPNS reference because the feed will never change making it mostly useless.
- leokennis 4y ago
  This is indeed the first rule. And offer useful feeds too. If you’re a newspaper, hardly anyone will be interested if you offer just one “firehose” feed of everything you publish. A nice example on how to do it is The Guardian. Basically any category page you can visit is also a feed.
Jaruzel 4y ago
Re: Discovery A pet peeve of mine, is where some enterprising web developer has either built a theme, or hacked an existing one and removed or not added the <link> tag for the RSS feed, when the site engine in question DOES have a working RSS feed. You see this a lot on customised WordPress sites. I end up having to try all variants of feed URLs I can think of until I find the feed. Surprisingly, most non-bespoke site engines still have working feeds, so the hit rate is quite high. I also miss the days of browsers auto-extracting the <link> tag and showing an RSS icon when a feed is found.
- benrapscallion 4y ago
  If it’s Wordpress based, the feed is usually found by adding /feed and if it is a Tumblr website, by appending /rss
  - kevincox 4y ago
    I've yet to see a Tumblr site that didn't have working autodiscovery. But maybe I just haven't seen a custom-enough theme yet.
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    Possibilities include: .../rss , .../rss.xml , .../.rss , .../rss_full.xml , .../feed , .../rss-feed , .../feed/all/ , .../MySection.xml , .../MySection.atom , feedserver.example.com/section/index ...
- leephillips 4y ago
  Vivaldi does the auto-extracting, and displays the RSS icon. You can click on it to subscribe. Vivaldi’s built-in feed reader is a bit clunky, but it works.
  - stereoradonc 4y ago
    Yay for another vivaldi user!
    - 4y ago
ryanbrunner 4y ago
I work more with podcast feeds vs article feeds, but the most important lesson I learned when it comes to RSS is that what readers actually do has is not necessarily what you would think, or sometimes even not what the spec says. It's the wild west, even with major readers, and you have to do the work and test in different players if you're producing your own RSS. We have a huge internal document of how RSS elements map to UI in every player and all the gotchas, and we still discover new things years after initial development.
- notRobot 4y ago
  This sounds like a lot of fun (to me!), where do you work, if you don't mind me asking, and are you hiring by any chance?
  - abacusmagic 4y ago
    Presumably here : https://www.supercast.com/open-positions/software-developer https://www.supercast.com/open-positions/software-developer
  - ryanbrunner 4y ago
    Always! Reach out at ryan at supercast dot com
- zackees 4y ago
  The problem is that there are huge swaths of use cases that are not covered by the current rss standard. For example, want to use standard RSS for your video feed? Ooops! RSS does not support thumbnails, duration and a bunch of other features. So everyone goes ahead and makes their dialect of RSS and pushes that. Apple did this with iTunes and so did YouTube. What clearly needs to happen is that RSS needs to have a refresh. The common uses cases need to be integrated into the standard.
  - genmon 4y ago
    “Dialect” implies that this is ad hoc, but the RSS 2.0 standard specifies a way to extend the format and that is through namespaces, which is exactly what Apple does with the iTunes namespace. This is a good way to extend the format IMO: no breaking changes and the opportunity to grow.
benrapscallion 4y ago
Another best practice would be for a page to prioritize the order of multiple feeds: eg many Wordpress have the comments feed listed first and feed readers assume that that is the page feed.
- onionisafruit 4y ago
  I’ve fallen for this so many times. I like an article and decide to subscribe to the rss feed only to have a bunch of comments show up in my reader. If I have to view source to find the right url, I’m probably not going to subscribe.
- kevincox 4y ago
  Thanks, I'll add a note on the page. I don't know how consistent ordering is but it seems like a good idea anyways.
thirdplace_ 4y ago
That blog post is packed with useful info. See also https://discovery.thirdplace.no/?q=kevincox.ca https://discovery.thirdplace.no/?q=kevincox.ca for feed discovery. Disclaimer: I built it.
throwaway14356 4y ago
put your feed at /feed/ As every wp site (that didn't switch it off) has a feed there it is more reliable than favicon.ico you will also find lots of feeds there not linked any place. I think many authors are not even aware they have it. I like it as you don't have to visit the domain, you can simply point a feed reader at a list of (slightly modified) domain names and discover many precious shiny things.
brycewray 4y ago
> Other common formats are earlier RSS standards and JSON Feed or Microformats h-feed. I would avoid using these—or even less common formats—as they are less widely supported. Agree that RSS is imperative; don’t agree about excluding JSON feeds. One can do both.
- kevincox 4y ago
  One can, but I've found little value to this. What are you giving your readers with JSON feeds that the RSS or Atom feed isn't giving them?
  - brycewray 4y ago
    Some prefer it. It offers another two or three fields that RSS doesn't. In any event, it requires virtually zero extra effort after initial setup, so I see no reason not to offer both. Different strokes...
unraveller 4y ago
I wish creators offered trending RSS feeds with a new title & guid every time the views or comments/interactions double above the norm. RSS Feed Best Practices 10 | RSS Feed Best Practices ~~~ 37 | RSS Feed Best Practices ~~~~ Many already have the comment count on hand and it's not really respam in your combined feed as you get fresh data at the old position. The ~ just lets you search for hottest things when you are pressed for time as most search boxes require at least 3 chars.
- kevincox 4y ago
  This sounds like it would be better as a reader feature than a feed feature. However I am not aware of any extensions for providing this information to readers. A simple proposal would be something like <comments count="23" last="TIMESTAMP"> and <score>72</score>. Then the reader could re-surface these items to you if they pass particular thresholds. Of course there are some details such as ensuring that entries with recently updated comment counts appear back on the first page (or that old pages are scanned for updated entries). Also I think WebSub doesn't work here because it excludes entries that have been seen before (which won't be an issue for your original proposal).
polalavik 4y ago
Is it typical to have non-blog site updates distributed as a feed? I have a blog page and a link aggregator page and I provide a feed for when the link aggregation page has updated. I just can’t tell if people ever use it like that?
- gumby 4y ago
  I use RSS to follow software releases. This is handy for example for packages hosted on github.
  - kevincox 4y ago
    On a similar note Repology is very useful for package maintainers. It has feeds for out-of-date packages that you maintain: https://repology.org/maintainer/kevincox%40kevincox.ca https://repology.org/maintainer/kevincox%40kevincox.ca
- kevincox 4y ago
  Definitely! It doesn't hurt much to have more feeds. Sure, you don't want to advertise 100 feeds on each page but using it smartly can be very helpful for users. Some of the non-blog feeds I am subscribed to: - Videos. (Basically the same use case as blogs though) - Releases of various projects. (GitHub for example supports this) - FeedBurner has a feed for problems detected in your feeds. (Although I don't use FeedBurner anymore) - Hacker News posts on the front page with >400 points. - A handful of Reddit searches. - My Reddit inbox. - A feed of WebMentions to my blog. - A feed of packages that I maintain for nixpkgs that are out-of-date. Really anything that someone may want to be notified about can be a useful feed. For example I can imagine a feed of price changes for a product so people can wait for it to go on sale. The search feeds can be expensive for the site if they aren't careful. But between "materialized" and caching it can be made pretty cheap. If you are careful you can even make these work with WebSub. (If you run your own hub you can know what the subscriptions are and either run them periodically or actually check the queries against new items in real-time)
lloydatkinson 4y ago
I wish it covered how to properly do images. All the SO posts on the topic suggest embedded HTML
- kevincox 4y ago
  I don't think I have enough experience to write that advice. But from what I have seen embedded HTML is the most reliable. You can also use enclosures but not all readers will display these. Notably WordPress puts every embedded image into an enclosure so a lot of places just ignore them to avoid duplicates.
  - lloydatkinson 4y ago
    It’s just crazy to me that RSS doesn’t have a property specifically for an image URL. Like, what’s the problem with that? Does ATOM have this support?
    - kevincox 4y ago
      The question is what do you mean by "image URL". Is this a poster, hero image, site logo, the content of the post itself? This is what is lacking. In RSS the main media attachment is the <enclosure> element. However like a lot of things in RSS it is poorly specified. For example it isn't even clear if you can have multiple. If you have multiple are they different representations of the same resource or different resources? https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html#ltenclosuregtSubelementOfLtitemgt https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html#ltenclosuregtSu... The solution to this is the Media RSS spec. (Which is also commonly used in Atom. XML namespaces are actually kinda nice.) This is a lot better if only because they contain the <group> element which makes it clear what different things mean. (Different representations or different resources.) Unfortunately support is still varied and it isn't always clear if this is just a copy of every image in the post (WordPress...), only semantically relevant images, or images that are the point of the entry but don't appear in the post. https://www.rssboard.org/media-rss https://www.rssboard.org/media-rss So unfortunately the best path forward is probably yet another standard that makes these clear from the outset, and hoping that people actually follow the rules. Not an easy path forward. Again, I'm not an expert on media in feeds, but based on the feeds I have seen trying to write a feed reader I would do the following if I was creating a feed with media in it. 1. Use Media RSS. Don't use <enclosure> at all unless you are a podcast. 2. Only reference interesting images directly. You are welcome to include whatever you want in the HTML for stylistic reasons but don't put reference it outside of the HTML unless it is actually an interesting image. 3. Put every media element in a group. Basically because WordPress puts everything into a media element and it is unclear if these are the same images, duplicates or even interesting at all (I don't need the author's avatar listed in the media elements WordPress...). Even if you only have one representation put it in a group just because it is unambiguous what you mean. If anyone has more experience here I would love to hear what you think.
_Algernon_ 4y ago
I was hoping for an article with best practices for readers of rss feeds. Every attempt to use rss in my past has resulted in a useless feed of way too many unread, stale items. The goal of rss is for me that everything I am interested in should come to me. This breaks down the moment a high frequency feed (such as news) is in the mix, which is why I don't use it (outside podcasts).
- dflock 4y ago
  I either don't sub to high frequency feeds, or have them not appear in the general uread feed, so I can go look at them when I want, but they don't swamp everything else.
pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
This list should include an exhortation to add an xml-stylesheet processing instruction to your feed, so people who have no idea what RSS is aren't dumped into a blob of raw XML before backing out and concluding that they're not supposed to be there. There's an already-baked XSL template available on aboutfeeds.com that you can pretty trivially copy onto your Web server and link to from your feed. We're better off if more people are aware of RSS, and having a simple way to teach them is useful.
- mariusor 4y ago
  That sounds interesting. Do you have an example of this in the wild?
  - kevincox 4y ago
    FeedBurner is well know for doing this. For example https://feeds.feedburner.com/GoogleAppsUpdates https://feeds.feedburner.com/GoogleAppsUpdates
    - mkr-hn 4y ago
      I know it used to be that, but it looks like an ordinary HTML web page now.
      - kevincox 4y ago
        Hmm, I swear that I viewed source and saw XML but you are right. It is definitely just HTML now.
  - pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
    Here's the RSS for the blog of the aboutfeeds.com maintainer (genmon here on HN—including here in the comments to this submission): <https://interconnected.org/home/feed https://interconnected.org/home/feed> If you wanted an informal list of people making use of this pretty-feed.xsl specifically, it would be possible to solicit that sort of thing through GitHub and see if others come out of the woodwork to identify themselves.
derekzhouzhen 4y ago
Both RSS2 and Atom has official validators. I also have a linter here: https://roastidio.us/lint https://roastidio.us/lint That check the metadata consistency between the blog and the feed.
Abishek_Muthian 4y ago
I love RSS, I've built News aggregators which consumed RSS feeds in the past i.e. before Social Media took over as News aggregators and News outlets stopped caring about their RSS feeds(Not sticking to standards, garbage feeds etc.). I'd like to get into News aggregation with RSS again now that I think there are some significant population who think Social Media may not be the best way to consume news. So I made a cursory exploration of the status of RSS feed support for major news outlets. To my surprise, Many do still support RSS incl. those with paywalls. It's surprising because AFAIK Google doesn't mandate RSS to index their news, Apps like Feedly which started out as pure RSS aggregator went onto HTML parsing of major news websites by the time I abandoned my RSS feed aggregation apps. Are the news outlets still supporting RSS because? 1. Legacy systems which depend upon RSS. 2. There have been a rise in demand for RSS feeds. 3. It's the right thing to do, for journalism. 4. None of the above.
ChrisArchitect 4y ago
RSS feed best practices? While it's nice some may be giving more serious thought to blogging/revisiting blogging - - what year is it? There aren't 500 posts like this from 2008?

220 points by nalgeon 4y ago

rambambram 4y ago

Where's your feed icon then? ;)

kevincox 4y ago
Oh, feed icons. That is a good one to add!
- rambambram 4y ago
  I want to follow your website's feed (at https://kevincox.ca/feed.atom https://kevincox.ca/feed.atom). Good article!

the_third_wave 4y ago

RSS Feed Best Practice #1: make sure your service/site/resource has a feed. Am I missing something or is this site missing one?

mdp2021 4y ago
> is this site missing one Which site? For the submitted one, you have to search for 'atom' in the source markup; for HN, for 'rss'. -- kevincox.ca <link href=../../../../feed.atom rel=alternate title="Blog Posts" type=application/atom+xml> HN <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="rss">
kevincox 4y ago
The site definitely has a feed. Although I don't have a visible link to it. I am sort of intentionally ignoring my recommendation to provide a link and RSS icon as an experiment to see how well feed discovery is supported and used. I wouldn't recommend this but I've been going back and forth with this on my personal blog as it isn't very important if the maximum number of people can find the feed. If you just paste the page into your feed reader it should find the feed for you.
- rainworld 4y ago
  NetNewsWire seems to have a problem discovering the feed from index pages (e.g. https://kevincox.ca/2022/05/ https://kevincox.ca/2022/05/).
  - kevincox 4y ago
    Weird, the link is the same as the other pages and it on other sites: https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=https%3A%2F%2Fkevincox.ca%2F2022%2F05%2F https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=https%3A%2F%2Fke... https://feedmail.org/subscriptions/new?url=https%3A%2F%2Fkevincox.ca%2F2022%2F05%2F https://feedmail.org/subscriptions/new?url=https%3A%2F%2Fkev... However I noticed that this site also has trouble: https://discovery.thirdplace.no/?url=&q=https%3A%2F%2Fkevincox.ca%2F2022%2F05%2F https://discovery.thirdplace.no/?url=&q=https%3A%2F%2Fkevinc...
- leephillips 4y ago
  Vivaldi discovers the feed.
- mdp2021 4y ago
  By the way, Kevin: it may seem overly picky, but would it not be cleaner to have <link href=/feed.atom rel=alternate title="Blog Posts" type=application/atom+xml> instead of <link href=../../../../feed.atom rel=alternate title="Blog Posts" type=application/atom+xml> ?
  - kevincox 4y ago
    It could, but my site is available via IPFS so I use relative links everywhere in case a gateway is used. For example https://ipfs.io/ipns/kevincox.ca/2022/05/06/rss-feed-best-practices/ https://ipfs.io/ipns/kevincox.ca/2022/05/06/rss-feed-best-pr.... That being said with subdomain gateways being widely available now it is pretty safe to go back to absolute links as https://kevincox-ca.ipns.dweb.link/2022/05/06/rss-feed-best-practices/ https://kevincox-ca.ipns.dweb.link/2022/05/06/rss-feed-best-... handles absolute references just fine. And of course none of this matters much if you have a non-IPNS reference because the feed will never change making it mostly useless.
leokennis 4y ago
This is indeed the first rule. And offer useful feeds too. If you’re a newspaper, hardly anyone will be interested if you offer just one “firehose” feed of everything you publish. A nice example on how to do it is The Guardian. Basically any category page you can visit is also a feed.

Jaruzel 4y ago

Re: Discovery A pet peeve of mine, is where some enterprising web developer has either built a theme, or hacked an existing one and removed or not added the <link> tag for the RSS feed, when the site engine in question DOES have a working RSS feed. You see this a lot on customised WordPress sites. I end up having to try all variants of feed URLs I can think of until I find the feed. Surprisingly, most non-bespoke site engines still have working feeds, so the hit rate is quite high. I also miss the days of browsers auto-extracting the <link> tag and showing an RSS icon when a feed is found.

benrapscallion 4y ago
If it’s Wordpress based, the feed is usually found by adding /feed and if it is a Tumblr website, by appending /rss
- kevincox 4y ago
  I've yet to see a Tumblr site that didn't have working autodiscovery. But maybe I just haven't seen a custom-enough theme yet.
- mdp2021 4y ago
  Possibilities include: .../rss , .../rss.xml , .../.rss , .../rss_full.xml , .../feed , .../rss-feed , .../feed/all/ , .../MySection.xml , .../MySection.atom , feedserver.example.com/section/index ...
leephillips 4y ago
Vivaldi does the auto-extracting, and displays the RSS icon. You can click on it to subscribe. Vivaldi’s built-in feed reader is a bit clunky, but it works.
- stereoradonc 4y ago
  Yay for another vivaldi user!
  - 4y ago

ryanbrunner 4y ago

I work more with podcast feeds vs article feeds, but the most important lesson I learned when it comes to RSS is that what readers actually do has is not necessarily what you would think, or sometimes even not what the spec says. It's the wild west, even with major readers, and you have to do the work and test in different players if you're producing your own RSS. We have a huge internal document of how RSS elements map to UI in every player and all the gotchas, and we still discover new things years after initial development.

notRobot 4y ago
This sounds like a lot of fun (to me!), where do you work, if you don't mind me asking, and are you hiring by any chance?
- abacusmagic 4y ago
  Presumably here : https://www.supercast.com/open-positions/software-developer https://www.supercast.com/open-positions/software-developer
- ryanbrunner 4y ago
  Always! Reach out at ryan at supercast dot com
zackees 4y ago
The problem is that there are huge swaths of use cases that are not covered by the current rss standard. For example, want to use standard RSS for your video feed? Ooops! RSS does not support thumbnails, duration and a bunch of other features. So everyone goes ahead and makes their dialect of RSS and pushes that. Apple did this with iTunes and so did YouTube. What clearly needs to happen is that RSS needs to have a refresh. The common uses cases need to be integrated into the standard.
- genmon 4y ago
  “Dialect” implies that this is ad hoc, but the RSS 2.0 standard specifies a way to extend the format and that is through namespaces, which is exactly what Apple does with the iTunes namespace. This is a good way to extend the format IMO: no breaking changes and the opportunity to grow.

benrapscallion 4y ago

Another best practice would be for a page to prioritize the order of multiple feeds: eg many Wordpress have the comments feed listed first and feed readers assume that that is the page feed.

onionisafruit 4y ago
I’ve fallen for this so many times. I like an article and decide to subscribe to the rss feed only to have a bunch of comments show up in my reader. If I have to view source to find the right url, I’m probably not going to subscribe.
kevincox 4y ago
Thanks, I'll add a note on the page. I don't know how consistent ordering is but it seems like a good idea anyways.

thirdplace_ 4y ago

That blog post is packed with useful info. See also https://discovery.thirdplace.no/?q=kevincox.ca https://discovery.thirdplace.no/?q=kevincox.ca for feed discovery. Disclaimer: I built it.

throwaway14356 4y ago

put your feed at /feed/ As every wp site (that didn't switch it off) has a feed there it is more reliable than favicon.ico you will also find lots of feeds there not linked any place. I think many authors are not even aware they have it. I like it as you don't have to visit the domain, you can simply point a feed reader at a list of (slightly modified) domain names and discover many precious shiny things.

brycewray 4y ago

> Other common formats are earlier RSS standards and JSON Feed or Microformats h-feed. I would avoid using these—or even less common formats—as they are less widely supported. Agree that RSS is imperative; don’t agree about excluding JSON feeds. One can do both.

kevincox 4y ago
One can, but I've found little value to this. What are you giving your readers with JSON feeds that the RSS or Atom feed isn't giving them?
- brycewray 4y ago
  Some prefer it. It offers another two or three fields that RSS doesn't. In any event, it requires virtually zero extra effort after initial setup, so I see no reason not to offer both. Different strokes...

unraveller 4y ago

I wish creators offered trending RSS feeds with a new title & guid every time the views or comments/interactions double above the norm. RSS Feed Best Practices 10 | RSS Feed Best Practices ~~~ 37 | RSS Feed Best Practices ~~~~ Many already have the comment count on hand and it's not really respam in your combined feed as you get fresh data at the old position. The ~ just lets you search for hottest things when you are pressed for time as most search boxes require at least 3 chars.

kevincox 4y ago
This sounds like it would be better as a reader feature than a feed feature. However I am not aware of any extensions for providing this information to readers. A simple proposal would be something like <comments count="23" last="TIMESTAMP"> and <score>72</score>. Then the reader could re-surface these items to you if they pass particular thresholds. Of course there are some details such as ensuring that entries with recently updated comment counts appear back on the first page (or that old pages are scanned for updated entries). Also I think WebSub doesn't work here because it excludes entries that have been seen before (which won't be an issue for your original proposal).

polalavik 4y ago

Is it typical to have non-blog site updates distributed as a feed? I have a blog page and a link aggregator page and I provide a feed for when the link aggregation page has updated. I just can’t tell if people ever use it like that?

gumby 4y ago
I use RSS to follow software releases. This is handy for example for packages hosted on github.
- kevincox 4y ago
  On a similar note Repology is very useful for package maintainers. It has feeds for out-of-date packages that you maintain: https://repology.org/maintainer/kevincox%40kevincox.ca https://repology.org/maintainer/kevincox%40kevincox.ca
kevincox 4y ago
Definitely! It doesn't hurt much to have more feeds. Sure, you don't want to advertise 100 feeds on each page but using it smartly can be very helpful for users. Some of the non-blog feeds I am subscribed to: - Videos. (Basically the same use case as blogs though) - Releases of various projects. (GitHub for example supports this) - FeedBurner has a feed for problems detected in your feeds. (Although I don't use FeedBurner anymore) - Hacker News posts on the front page with >400 points. - A handful of Reddit searches. - My Reddit inbox. - A feed of WebMentions to my blog. - A feed of packages that I maintain for nixpkgs that are out-of-date. Really anything that someone may want to be notified about can be a useful feed. For example I can imagine a feed of price changes for a product so people can wait for it to go on sale. The search feeds can be expensive for the site if they aren't careful. But between "materialized" and caching it can be made pretty cheap. If you are careful you can even make these work with WebSub. (If you run your own hub you can know what the subscriptions are and either run them periodically or actually check the queries against new items in real-time)

lloydatkinson 4y ago

I wish it covered how to properly do images. All the SO posts on the topic suggest embedded HTML

kevincox 4y ago
I don't think I have enough experience to write that advice. But from what I have seen embedded HTML is the most reliable. You can also use enclosures but not all readers will display these. Notably WordPress puts every embedded image into an enclosure so a lot of places just ignore them to avoid duplicates.
- lloydatkinson 4y ago
  It’s just crazy to me that RSS doesn’t have a property specifically for an image URL. Like, what’s the problem with that? Does ATOM have this support?
  - kevincox 4y ago
    The question is what do you mean by "image URL". Is this a poster, hero image, site logo, the content of the post itself? This is what is lacking. In RSS the main media attachment is the <enclosure> element. However like a lot of things in RSS it is poorly specified. For example it isn't even clear if you can have multiple. If you have multiple are they different representations of the same resource or different resources? https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html#ltenclosuregtSubelementOfLtitemgt https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html#ltenclosuregtSu... The solution to this is the Media RSS spec. (Which is also commonly used in Atom. XML namespaces are actually kinda nice.) This is a lot better if only because they contain the <group> element which makes it clear what different things mean. (Different representations or different resources.) Unfortunately support is still varied and it isn't always clear if this is just a copy of every image in the post (WordPress...), only semantically relevant images, or images that are the point of the entry but don't appear in the post. https://www.rssboard.org/media-rss https://www.rssboard.org/media-rss So unfortunately the best path forward is probably yet another standard that makes these clear from the outset, and hoping that people actually follow the rules. Not an easy path forward. Again, I'm not an expert on media in feeds, but based on the feeds I have seen trying to write a feed reader I would do the following if I was creating a feed with media in it. 1. Use Media RSS. Don't use <enclosure> at all unless you are a podcast. 2. Only reference interesting images directly. You are welcome to include whatever you want in the HTML for stylistic reasons but don't put reference it outside of the HTML unless it is actually an interesting image. 3. Put every media element in a group. Basically because WordPress puts everything into a media element and it is unclear if these are the same images, duplicates or even interesting at all (I don't need the author's avatar listed in the media elements WordPress...). Even if you only have one representation put it in a group just because it is unambiguous what you mean. If anyone has more experience here I would love to hear what you think.

_Algernon_ 4y ago

I was hoping for an article with best practices for readers of rss feeds. Every attempt to use rss in my past has resulted in a useless feed of way too many unread, stale items. The goal of rss is for me that everything I am interested in should come to me. This breaks down the moment a high frequency feed (such as news) is in the mix, which is why I don't use it (outside podcasts).

dflock 4y ago
I either don't sub to high frequency feeds, or have them not appear in the general uread feed, so I can go look at them when I want, but they don't swamp everything else.

pwdisswordfish9 4y ago

This list should include an exhortation to add an xml-stylesheet processing instruction to your feed, so people who have no idea what RSS is aren't dumped into a blob of raw XML before backing out and concluding that they're not supposed to be there. There's an already-baked XSL template available on aboutfeeds.com that you can pretty trivially copy onto your Web server and link to from your feed. We're better off if more people are aware of RSS, and having a simple way to teach them is useful.

mariusor 4y ago
That sounds interesting. Do you have an example of this in the wild?
- kevincox 4y ago
  FeedBurner is well know for doing this. For example https://feeds.feedburner.com/GoogleAppsUpdates https://feeds.feedburner.com/GoogleAppsUpdates
  - mkr-hn 4y ago
    I know it used to be that, but it looks like an ordinary HTML web page now.
    - kevincox 4y ago
      Hmm, I swear that I viewed source and saw XML but you are right. It is definitely just HTML now.
- pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
  Here's the RSS for the blog of the aboutfeeds.com maintainer (genmon here on HN—including here in the comments to this submission): <https://interconnected.org/home/feed https://interconnected.org/home/feed> If you wanted an informal list of people making use of this pretty-feed.xsl specifically, it would be possible to solicit that sort of thing through GitHub and see if others come out of the woodwork to identify themselves.

derekzhouzhen 4y ago

Both RSS2 and Atom has official validators. I also have a linter here: https://roastidio.us/lint https://roastidio.us/lint That check the metadata consistency between the blog and the feed.

Abishek_Muthian 4y ago

I love RSS, I've built News aggregators which consumed RSS feeds in the past i.e. before Social Media took over as News aggregators and News outlets stopped caring about their RSS feeds(Not sticking to standards, garbage feeds etc.). I'd like to get into News aggregation with RSS again now that I think there are some significant population who think Social Media may not be the best way to consume news. So I made a cursory exploration of the status of RSS feed support for major news outlets. To my surprise, Many do still support RSS incl. those with paywalls. It's surprising because AFAIK Google doesn't mandate RSS to index their news, Apps like Feedly which started out as pure RSS aggregator went onto HTML parsing of major news websites by the time I abandoned my RSS feed aggregation apps. Are the news outlets still supporting RSS because? 1. Legacy systems which depend upon RSS. 2. There have been a rise in demand for RSS feeds. 3. It's the right thing to do, for journalism. 4. None of the above.

ChrisArchitect 4y ago

RSS feed best practices? While it's nice some may be giving more serious thought to blogging/revisiting blogging - - what year is it? There aren't 500 posts like this from 2008?