If you're generating your website with Jekyll or another static website generator, don't forget to also expose a web feed for us old timer using RSS readers. The format we'll be preferring here is Atom.
Some reasons to expose a web feed:
- people using RSS readers regularly are pretty loyal, RSS/Atom subscribers being like a mailing list for some of us
- tooling knows RSS/Atom — e.g. the easiest way to build a mailing list is to give Mailchimp your RSS feed
If you're looking for a recommendation on online RSS readers, I personally like Newsblur.
You can usually find a plugin that takes care of everything for you, with a little configuration, like this one:
Generating an atom.xml
file is super easy. Something like this:
---
layout: null
---
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<id>{{ site.url }}</id>
<title>{{ site.title }}</title>
<link type="application/atom+xml" href="{{ site.url }}/atom.xml" rel="self"/>
<link type="text/html" href="{{ site.url }}" rel="alternate"/>
<updated>{{ site.time | date_to_xmlschema }}</updated>
<author>
<name>{{ site.author.name }}</name>
<email>{{ site.author.email }}</email>
<url>{{ site.author.url }}</url>
</author>
{% for post in site.posts %}
<entry>
<title>{{ post.title }}</title>
<link href="{{ site.url }}{{ post.url }}"/>
<updated>{{ post.date | date_to_xmlschema }}</updated>
<id>{{ site.url }}{{ post.id }}</id>
<author>
<name>{{ site.author.name }}</name>
<uri>{{ site.author.url }}</uri>
</author>
<rights type="text">
Copyright {{ site.time | date: '%y' }} {{ site.author.name }}.
Some rights reserved (CC BY-NC 3.0)
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
</rights>
{% for category in post.categories %}
<category><![CDATA[{{ category }}]]></category>
{% endfor %}
<content type="html"><![CDATA[
{{ post.excerpt }}
<p><a rel="full-article" href="{{ site.url }}{{ post.url }}?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication">
<b>Read This Article »</b>
</a></p>
]]></content>
</entry>
{% endfor %}
</feed>
Then don't forget to add this meta-tag in the <head>
of every HTML page, for discovery:
<head>
<!-- ... -->
<link rel="alternate" href="/atom.xml" title="Atom feed" type="application/atom+xml">
</head>