RSS Tutorial
By Mark Nottingham
2007-12-23
Tips for Generating Good Feeds
RSS and Atom are easy to work with, but like any new format, you may encounter some
problems in using them. This section attempts to address the most common issues
that arise when generating a feed.
- Distinct Entries — Make sure that aggregators can tell
your entries apart, by using different identifiers in
rdf:about (RSS 1.0),
guid (RSS 2.0) and id (Atom). This will save a lot of
headaches down the road. - Meaningful Metadata — Try to make the metadata useful
on its own; for example, if you only include a short
<title>, people may not know what the link is about.
By the same token, if you shove an entire article into
<description>, it’ll crowd people’s view of the feed,
and they’re less likely to stay interested in what you have to say.
Generally, you want to put enough into the feed to help someone decide
whether they should follow the link. - Encoding HTML — Although it’s tempting, refrain from
including HTML markup (like
<a href="...">,
<b> or <p>) in your RSS feed;
because you don’t know how it will be presented, doing so can prevent
your feed from being displayed correctly. If you need to include a a tag
in the text of the feed (e.g., the title of an entry is “Ode to
<title>”), make sure you escape ampersands and angle brackets (so
that it would be “Ode to <title>”). - XML Entities — Remember that XML doesn’t predefine
entities like HTML does; therefore, you won’t have
© and other common entities
available. You can define them in the XML, or alternatively just use an
character encoding that makes what you need available. - Character Encoding — Some software generates feeds
using Windows character sets, and sometimes mislabels them. The safest
thing to do is to encode your feed as UTF-8 and check it by parsing it
with an XML parser.
- Communicating with Viewers — Don’t use entries in your
feed to communicate to your users; for example, some feeds have been
known to use the
<description> to dictate copyright
terms. Use the appropriate element or module. - Communicating with Machines — Likewise, use the
appropriate HTTP status codes if your feed has relocated (usually,
301 Moved Permanently) or is no longer available (410
Gone or 404 Not Found). - Making your Feed Cache-Friendly — Successful feeds
see a fair amount of traffic because clients poll them often to see if
they’ve changed. To support the load, Web Caching can help; see the caching tutorial.
- Validate — use the Feed Validator to catch any problems in your feed; it works
with RSS and Atom. Also, don’t just run it once; make sure you regularly check
your feed, so that you can catch transient errors.
Tutorial Pages:
»
Introducing RSS
»
Choosing Content for Your Feeds
»
Publishing Your Feed
»
Telling People About Your Feed
»
Format Versions and Modules
»
Which Format Should I Choose?
» Tips for Generating Good Feeds
»
Feed Tools
»
More Information
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