RSS Quick Start Guide
So you want to start aggregating your Internet experience in an RSS feed reader? Or maybe you want to publish a feed of your own? Hey, I get it. I've been in both positions, and it can be a lot to handle when you don't know where to start. This page is written to be a Quick Start guide to reading, writing, and using RSS feeds.
The easiest way to start is to install a feed reader and start following a feed, so you get an idea of how it works, and have a setup that allows you to add more feeds in the future whenever you find them. This process is incredibly easy, and I'll walk you through it. First, you'll need an RSS feed reader. This is generally an app that catalogues the links to RSS feeds you want to follow, interprets the XML code, and displays the posts, while also automatically checking for new posts at regular intervals. There's a lot of feed readers out there, including plenty that work as webapps accessible from a browser page, or standalone apps you can download. Most of these will end up having some kind of paywall, whether that's an upfront fee for getting the app, or a subscription to a webapp. The only thing that really sets different readers apart is features, and believe it or not, you don't have to pay to get the features you want!
When it comes to readers, my preferred format is a browser extension, for a very simple reason: you'll never be using a feed reader when you're without Internet. A standalone app stills needs a connection to fetch new posts, so what does it matter if it exists in your browser or not? And I say extension and not a webapp because 1) a browser extension stores a lot of data locally and without the need for an account, making it less likely you'll lose a password, lose a saved feed or setting, etc. and 2) because webapps need money to keep their service live, so they almost always have a subscription that limits things like how many feeds you can follow, what settings you can and can't access, etc.
To this end, I use the browser extension Feebro, and highly recommend it to others looking to start using RSS. It's compatible with Firefox, Chrome, and even Edge. I desperately want to meet the person who uses Microsoft Edge as their default browser and a feed reader with it.
Once you have your reader of choice, all you need is a link to an RSS feed. This will usually look like a link that ends in ".../RSS" or ".../RSS.xml" For example, you can find my RSS feed at ".../RSS.xml" What this does is display the raw output of a .xml file, which means nothing to you, but everything to a feed reader. When you click to add a new feed, it will ask for a link, where you can copy/paste the XML link you found. If you're using Feebro, go ahead and click the Load button next to the link once you paste it, and it will automatically load the feed title, last time updated, etc. Then just hit the save button, and voilà! You are now following an RSS feed! Your reader should automatically check for new posts periodically, and give a little badge on the apps's icon when there are new posts that are unread. If you have a browser extension, I recommend right-clicking it and selecting to pin it to your toolbar, as that will make it always visible, and you'll be less likely to miss when new posts are loaded. Feedbro even allows users to set custom rules that can send system notifications or play sounds when new posts are available!
If you're looking for RSS feeds, you'll find them all over the net, and in more places than you'd expect! For example, any given Tumblr blog has an RSS feed that can be generated by adding ".../RSS" to the end of a blog's website. For example, if you go to https://www.tumblr.com/transgirl-gaming-thoughts and add "/RSS" you won't get anything. However, if you go from my profile to the website version, https://transgirl-gaming-thoughts.tumblr.com/, you can add "/RSS" and get the link that your reader needs! You can further customize a Tumblr feed by limiting what tags can be featured in the RSS. This is as simple as taking your starting URL, adding ".../tagged/[tag]" and then adding the "/RSS" onto that. If someone were to do this to my blog, wanting to only see my original posts, that link would look like https://transgirl-gaming-thoughts.tumblr.com/tagged/assorted%20gaming%20thoughts/rss. This feed shows new Tumblr posts I make, but only if they are tagged "assorted gaming thoughts" which is the tag I use for original posts. You can do this with any tag, on any blog, so long as their website form is accessible! If a blog uses multiple tags for different kinds of original posts, I tend to follow their blog using multiple feeds, just so I don't miss any of the things I want to see.
Lot's of personal sites feature RSS feeds, as well as news sites like Trans News Network or even Nintendo Life. If you look, a lot of the sites you follow regularly probably have an RSS feed available, usually listed with their other social media buttons at the bottom of every page. Sometimes clicking this will prompt you to download a .xml file, but if you instead right-click the button and just choose to copy the link, it works just fine without any download needed. Even Bluesky profiles have RSS feeds that you can follow by adding "/RSS" to the end of the profile URL! The caveat here is that Bluesky doesn't support images or links embeded in RSS posts, so if you follow a lot of artists like I do, you may need to keep your mobile notifications on for that. I have feeds installed for a few people I follow who do a lot of textposts, and when there are links, you can just click on the post link to view the source post on the host site.
RSS feeds are a really simple syndication (good collection of words, we should name something after that) and allows for you to curate your Internet experience by bringing the posts to you, not the other way around. Social media sites thrive off of advertiser money, and that means they want you on their site as long as possible in order to see as many ads as possible. This means doomscrolling, this means ragebait, this means engagementbait, this means keeping you on their site or app as long as humanly possible, regardless of what they have to do in order to secure your time. If you struggle with any of these aspects of social media, it can be hard to keep up with people and profiles you really enjoy, because some days your aversion to social media as a whole is too much for you to even open the site. RSS feeds allow you to bring the posts to you, instead of having to trek through the dregs of social media just to see what your favorite artist posted on Tumblr, or what your favorite activist is talking about on Bluesky. It's also a superior alternative to newsletters and mailing lists, clearing up your email and offering you a curated feed of new content whenever you want it (and making it much easier to ignore when you don't!).
Moving onto part 2 of this Quick Start guide, how would you go about making your own RSS feed? Well, it obviously depends on what you're doing and where you're posting. If you run a Tumblr blog, go into your blog settings and make sure "Custom Theme" is enabled. This allows people to visit the website form of your blog, and by extension access an RSS feed. On Bluesky, as limited as it is, it's available just by adding onto the URL like we've been doing this whole time. If you're running a person site on a webhost, this will vary depending on your host. Hosts like WordPress offer a lot of automation in addition to their customization. Neocities is my host of choice, but their feed is linked to your profile, and simply alerts when the site has been updated in general, which tends to be somewhat unreliable, sometimes not catching smaller file updates, and sometimes over-sharing due to chaining changes back-to-back. The easiest way to publish an RSS feed will always be to do it yourself, by which I mean editing a .xml file by hand. This can seem overwhelming, and certainly takes more time compared to an automated service, but the freedom of expression that comes with coding it yourself only grows more valuable over time. If you're running a website of your own, running an independent RSS feed is the most reliable way to remain independent on the web.
"But how do I even go about starting that?" I found myself asking this with no response when I set out to start the process myself. Given how many guides and layout generators there are for HTML and CSS, I expected to find some similar guides for RSS, especially given how strict XML code can be. Despite this, all of the guides that I found were confusing to try and follow along, and ended up featuring some kind of misinformation, whether that be insufficiently explaining Unix-format date/time tags, or putting hyperspecific tags in the code that are actually optional, if they're even formatted correctly in the guide. It can be confusing, and if you don't know what you're looking at, you may end up taking it at face value and creating an RSS feed that doesn't work, leaving you frustrated and unable to figure out where you went wrong. This was my experience for two days, the first day consisting of a 4-hour debug session that left me with a lot of persistent issues but a feed that kinda worked, and another 2-hour rewrite session where I finally realized what tags were and weren't necessary for the feed to function, and finally had a working syndication.
Given how difficult and frustrating this was, I decided it would be worthwhile to create a really simple RSS feed template, with in-code text that explains what things are and how to use them, as well as the freedom to copy and reuse the code itself with or without credit to me. This template can be found at https://transgirl-gaming-thoughts.neocities.org/rss-template.xml and the source code needed can be viewed by right-clicking and selecting to view the page source. At this point you can freely copy any or all of the code present, and reuse it for your own RSS feed, no credit necessary. It should be mostly self-explanatory, but I'll also be explaining a few parts of it below, and offering some code snippets that you can copy directly.
The simplest part of the XML file I linked is the header information, which should look somewhat familiar to anyone who edits HTML pages. The first few lines in the <channel> section are related to information about your feed specifically, such as the title that gets loaded by readers automatically (users can name their feeds themselves if they want) or the description of the feed that can be displayed by some readers. There's a lot of other tags that can be featured here that include additional information for readers to load, but these are the only ones that are required base. I'll link resources at the bottom of this section, including a glossary of XML tags you can use to further define your feed for readers with more detailed features.
You may notice a line at the top, <atom:link href="https://transgirl-gaming-thoughts.neocities.org/rss-template.xml" rel="self" /> This line defines the location of the XML file the feed is being pulled from, and should link to the XML file on your site that is being used to generate the feed. This is a sort of self-identification for feeds and readers, and is also a required element. Just replace my RSS file link with your own, and you should be golden.
Now we're getting into the nitty-gritty of the feed's code, and that's the <item> element. Each <item> in the XML code is an individual post on the generated feed, and so their tags should be identical one to the next. You can see this in the template, where each <item> has different text and identifying information, but they're all made up of the same elements within the <item> tag. I'll list these elements below.
<title> dictates the title of the post. The text itself, when clicked, will act as a hyperlink to the URL provided in the <link> field.
<description> is the actual post text displayed in the reader. This can be anything, from a simple tagline about the linked page to tell people what it is you're posting, or the entirety of the page's content so people never even have to leave their reader.
<![CDATA[]]> is an optional (but very useful) tag to include within your <description> element. You can see in the template that I use this as an enclosure around the text in the <description>. This is because XML is very picky with its formatting, and if you want the actual text to have HTML formatting tags like <p> and <br>, you have to use <![CDATA[]]> around it so that the reader knows how to parse the HTML formatting tags from the XML code. When used, this allows you to use any standard HTML elements in formatting your post descriptions, including in-line links, images, etc.
<link> is the webpage you want your post to direct to. When people click on the <title> headline, they will be taken to whatever page is linked in this field.
<guid> is a unique ID tag that parses one post from another in readers. Each post should have a unique guid that is never repeated, otherwise some strange behavior can occur and ultimately wreck your feed on the user-end. Under normal circumstances, XML expects for this guid to be a link (usually the same as the <link> element), but in the template I have it modified as <guid isPermaLink="false"> which allows for non-URL guid values to be used, like the ones I used in the template. If you want to use a link as a guid, you can remove this element, no problem, but using it allows you to set any ID value you want for your posts, which can be useful for multiple posts that all lead back to the same webpage, like changelog announcements or updates to a previously published article.
<pubDate> is the date and time that the post was made. This is what allows a reader to list posts in order. It uses a Unix-based format, and is very strict with this. The format used in the template is all valid, and only requires simple changes to make it accurate to the time of posting. Every month uses the three-letter abbreviation, the date must use a two-digit format (e.g. 01, instead of 1), and must use 24-hour time (also formatted with two-digit values, e.g. 03:00, instead of 3:00). The final value is the timezone, so that readers can parse local times from the source, as compared to the destination. You can find this value by performing an Internet search for your local time zone's name, as long as it follows the format provided in the template.
And that's the basics of RSS coding! Using the template I provided, and the information in this guide, it should be fairly simple to figure out what does what. By replacing the values and text in the template, you should have no problem creating your own RSS feed for whatever you want! I'll link below a feed validator service that checks XML code and verifies your feed's code (just in case you missed something while editing or updating), as well as a resource on XML elements if you want to experiment with additional elements for readers to parse. As I previously stated, the entire template may be copied wholesale and reused in any way, with or without credit. I always use the feed validator before I save any changes to my feed's XML code, just to make sure everything is still valid before I save and send it out to everyone following my feed.
(If the validator says that the atom:link element doesn't correctly direct to your file, but you know for a fact the link is correct, this is perfectly fine to ignore. The validator sometimes has a hard time parsing indexed sites, and so this will usually return a potential error, even when everything is fine. If it says your feed is valid but has a potential issue with atom:link then you're fine to ignore it.)
Hopefully this guide was useful in teaching some of the basics of RSS feeds, both in use and in creation. If you have any problems using this guide, the RSS template, or have any further questions regarding the content discussed here, feel free to reach out to me at tgirl-gaming-thoughts@proton.me and I'll get back to you as soon as possible! Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoy the simplicity and control that RSS brings to the Internet!
~ Alex Amelia Pine