RSS is the part of the web that still works the way the web was supposed to. A reader subscribes to your site, and your new posts arrive in the app they chose, in order, with no algorithm deciding whether they see them. You don’t know who they are, and you don’t need to.
Almost every blogging tool makes a feed. Fewer make a good one. The difference is a handful of decisions, most of which are made once.
The formats, briefly
| Format | What to know |
|---|---|
| RSS 2.0 | The one everybody means by “RSS”. Every feed reader supports it. |
| Atom | A tidier alternative from the same era. Equally well supported. |
| JSON Feed | The same idea written as JSON, at version 1.1 since 2020. Pleasant to work with, and supported by most modern readers. |
You don’t need to choose for your readers. Offering RSS covers everyone. Offering JSON Feed as well costs nothing.
Full text, or excerpts?
This is the decision that matters most.
An excerpt feed carries a sentence or two of each post and a link. The reader has to click through to your site to read the rest.
A full-text feed carries the whole post, pictures included. In RSS that goes in an element called content:encoded, alongside the short description.
Publishers who live on advertising use excerpts, because the adverts are on the site. If you don’t have adverts, there is no reason to. People who use feed readers chose them because they want to read there. A feed that makes them leave gets unsubscribed from, and a full post in a reader is still your post, with your name on it and links back to you.
Send full text.
Help readers find it
A feed nobody can find has no subscribers. Three things fix that.
A link in the page’s head. This is how a feed reader finds your feed when someone pastes in your home page’s address.
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
title="Field Notes" href="https://example.com/feed.xml">
A visible link. Somewhere a human will see it: the footer, or the menu.
A Subscribe page. Most people have never used a feed reader. A short page that says “here is the address, here is what to do with it, and here is how to get posts by email instead” turns a mystery into an instruction.
One feed, or several?
One feed of everything is the default, and enough for most blogs.
If you write about several unrelated things, consider a feed for each category or tag. Someone who follows you for your photography may not want your notes on tax. Giving them a feed for the part they came for keeps a subscriber you would otherwise lose.
Small things that matter
Keep each item’s identifier stable. Every item in a feed has an ID. Readers use it to tell new posts from ones they have seen. If your IDs change, because you changed your addresses, say, every subscriber is shown your whole archive again as new. Nothing loses subscribers faster.
Limit the feed. A feed doesn’t need every post you ever wrote. The newest few dozen is the convention. Readers keep what they have already fetched.
Use real dates. A post’s date in the feed should be when it was published, not when the site was last rebuilt.
Include pictures with full addresses. A reader shows your post away from your site, so an image path that only works on your site shows as a broken picture.
Email, without running a newsletter
Plenty of readers want posts in their inbox and will never install a feed reader. You can serve them without becoming a newsletter operator, because several services will watch your feed and email each new post to people who signed up.
| Service | Its free tier, at the time of writing |
|---|---|
| follow.it | A free plan for publishers. |
| Blogtrottr | Free, supported by adverts in the emails. |
| Buttondown | Free for your first 100 subscribers. Sending from an RSS feed is a paid extra. |
| Mailchimp | Has an RSS-driven automation. Check what its free plan includes. |
The arrangement has a real advantage beyond convenience. The email service holds the list and does the sending, so the legal and technical work of running a mailing list is theirs. And if you change services, your site doesn’t change at all. You move the list and point the new one at the same feed.
What you don’t get is a newsletter that is different from your blog. If you want to write to subscribers separately, you want a newsletter tool proper. Substack alternatives that you actually own covers those.
Where Selfish fits
Selfish is a native app for iPhone, iPad and Mac that builds a static site and publishes it to hosting you control. Every site it builds has feeds once it has its address, made the way this article recommends.
- RSS and JSON Feed, both with whole posts and photos, both linked from every page’s head.
- The newest 50 posts in each, with the author, category and tags on every item.
- A feed for each category and tag, if you turn it on.
- Stable identifiers. If you change how your addresses look, the feed keeps each post’s identity, so subscribers aren’t shown old posts as new.
- A Subscribe page you can add to your menu, in your site’s language, listing every feed.
- Subscribe by email: give Selfish the address of the service you chose, and a link to it appears at the foot of every page.
- A podcast feed, for posts with audio.
Selfish doesn’t send email itself and holds no list. It is on the App Store as a one-time purchase, at a £3.99 introductory price, rising to £9.99 in December. Readers, feeds and links has the settings.