Working with publishers and polling hundreds of thousands of feed has taught us a few lessons and best practices for people who publish RSS or Atom feeds. You might disagree with some of them, so please, let us know in the comments.
I want to emphasize that these best practices are technical, not business related.
- Don’t use RSS and ATOM. There is no good feed parser that doesn’t accept both. Providing one will make subscribers life much easier :)
- Make sure your feeds are valid.
- Use unique identifiers for entries :
<guid>in RSS and<id>in ATOM - Don’t use feed caching if you can’t explicitly expire the cache. In other words, don’t use time based caches. Corollary : use Feedburner only if you use pingshot.
- Make sure your date format is valid :
ISO8601is the one you should choose. - Add the feeds discovery in your HTML pages. Most modern browsers (Chrome : WTF?!) will be able to detect that and show your visitors that the page references a feed. It will also help feed readers to auto-extract feeds.
- Make sure you’re RESTful in your feeds discovery. If you’re in a resource page, show feeds that relate to that resource. Make sure a given feed is accessible at a given url only.
- Use the “de-facto” standard in terms of calendar : Roman. The subscribing app may convert to other calendar, based on the user’s settings.
- Keep the feed urls simple. Do some URL rewriting.
- It’s ok to have only
<summary>instead of the full<content>(it’s a business decision) : but don’t show it as full content if it’s just a summary. - Special Bonus : publish feeds in realtime. We can help.
Thoughts?
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