I’ve never dealt with RSS before on a personal level. I’ve pretty much always used social media to discover blog posts. I’m wanting to set up RSS for my personal blog but since I have no experience, looking for some guidance for best practices. I’m currently setting up a script to automatically update the xml when I publish new posts.
Am I supposed to include the entire post in the description field? Or just a summary? How do I handle the markup and formatting of the post?
Am I supposed to delete items from the feed or do I just keep appending items to the bottom of it?
Its it good practice to include a thumbnail image or anything with the item in the feed? How is that possible.
How do I distribute the feed beyond adding a button on my site?
Thank you in advance to anyone for their advice.
How do I distribute the feed beyond adding a button on my site?
Some feed readers have the ability to auto-detect the RSS feed, if the site offers one. As an example, if your blog is located at https://mybloggingsite.com and the RSS feed can be accessed on a separate route (e.g. /feed), you can add the following somewhere under the <head> tag:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="https://mybloggingsite.com/feed">
I’d recommend doing this in combination with adding a visible button, so that users can access/subscribe to the feed using either option.