Pro RSS Website Feed: choose what subscribers receive

Choose a stream with a recognizable purpose

A feed might contain new essays, product release notes, local event announcements, or documentation updates. Write a one-sentence description that names the audience and the update type. If a proposed item does not fit, decide whether it belongs in another feed or should remain a website-only change.

Do not treat every rebuilt page as a new publication. Navigation adjustments, spelling fixes, and asset changes usually need a different policy from a newly published article. State that policy where editors can find it.

Choose the reading experience

Full-text entries let readers consume the supplied content in their reader. Excerpts provide an introduction and a link to the complete page. Choose deliberately, then test whether essential context, image descriptions, and source links remain understandable in the version you publish.

The RSS Best Practices Profile discusses interoperable use of RSS elements and extensions. Use it to check the representation of your chosen content, while keeping the editorial decision about what to include separate from the XML syntax.

Define selection and ordering rules

• Specify the content types or sections included in the feed.
• Exclude drafts, private pages, and material that has not been published.
• Choose a stable item identifier that survives ordinary edits.
• Use the canonical public page as the item’s destination.
• Distinguish original publication from a meaningful later update.
• Set a practical retention window and explain how older content remains discoverable.

Order a short sample by your intended publication policy and review it as a subscriber. Look for repeated items, out-of-sequence dates, and entries whose titles make sense only inside the website’s navigation.

Make the feed easy to find and maintain

Link to the feed from an obvious place on the site and include an appropriate feed-discovery link in the page head. Keep the feed address stable, document its purpose, and add its generation to the same publishing process that updates the pages.

After an edit, compare the page and feed for matching titles, URLs, and visible content. When a page is removed, apply a documented policy instead of silently assigning its identifier to something else.

Use the website feed tutorial to turn this publishing contract into a concrete file, then compare discovery roles in the sitemap guide.