Your feed

Every site here has a feed, at one address:

https://your-site.example/feed.xml

It lists your newest articles, newest first: each one’s title, its address, the date it was published and its excerpt. Articles are in it from the start. Any other collection joins it when you switch on In the RSS feed on its Settings tab, under Settings › Collections.

Who reads it

A feed is how a piece of writing travels without anybody visiting your site.

• Feed readers. Someone who follows a lot of small sites usually reads them in one app rather than by remembering to check each one.
• Newsletter tools. Most can send “the new posts since last time” by watching a feed, so your blog becomes your newsletter with no second copy of anything.
• Other people’s sites. A directory, an association page or a partner’s “latest from our members” block is often reading a feed.
• Assistants and crawlers. It is one of the first things they look for, and it says plainly what is new.

Readers find it on their own

Once your feed has something in it, every page on your site quietly points at the feed in its <head>. Paste any address on your site into a feed reader — your homepage will do — and it finds the feed itself. You never have to give anybody the /feed.xml address, though it works if you do.

Before your first article there is nothing to point at, so nothing does. The address still answers, with an empty list, which is what stops a reader who subscribed early from seeing an error every hour until you write something.

What is in it, and what is not

Articles, and any collection you add. Your pages are the shape of your site — About, Services, Contact — and they are not news. Only what arrives is in the feed; your pages are in your sitemap, where a search engine looks for them.

The excerpt, not the whole article. A reader shows the summary and a link, and people come to your site to read the piece. So write an excerpt worth showing: it is the same one your own listing cards use.

The newest ones. A feed is the recent stream, not the archive. Everything you have ever published stays in your sitemap, which is what a search engine reads.

It updates when you publish

The feed is rebuilt every time you publish, from the same list your blog index is built from — so it can never disagree with the site. Edit an article’s title or its date and the feed changes with everything else at the next Publish.

Two things worth knowing:

• A draft is not in it. Nothing is, until you publish.
• Renaming an article makes it a new item. Its address is its identity to a feed reader, and a rename is a new address. Visitors following the old link still arrive — you get a redirect automatically — but somebody’s reader may show the piece a second time. Worth doing before you announce something, rather than after.

Turning it off

Each collection has its own switch, In the RSS feed, on its Settings tab under Settings › Collections. Switch it off for Articles and they leave the feed at your next Publish. There is little reason to: a feed carries only what your site already publishes, to anybody who has already found the site. With nothing in it, nothing advertises it and nothing subscribes to it.