Handwriting Your RSS Feed

“A short guide for updating your RSS feed like you update your handmade website.

What’s RSS?

RSS—Really Simple Syndication—is a standardized web feed format originally released in 1999. It was the functional underpinning of the blog-era internet, and is still used extensively by news sites and podcasts, as well as personal blogs and newsletters (as well as weirder things).

An RSS feed is fundamentally just a webpage that can be read by an RSS reader (which is an application or browser extension that keeps an eye to the RSS feeds it is subscribed to). RSS feeds don’t send out notifications or messages to readers- RSS readers just ping the feeds they are subscribed to periodically and check for new content. If you use a podcast app, you use an RSS reader already!

Many blogging / social media / content-uploading type websites make an RSS feed for your channel / account / etc automatically– and there are automated tools you can use to add RSS functionality to blogs and websites where it doesn’t already exist.

But this isn’t the only way to generate RSS feeds. You can absolutely write RSS by hand—and it isn’t even hard.”