RSS guide
2025 July 27 // 2025, guide, webdev30/01/2026: Updated links
Edited on the 27/12/2025. For typos, grammar and clarity.
- What's an RSS feed?
- How do I see an RSS feed?
- How do I add an RSS to my feed?
- How do I make one?
- How do I know it's working?
- Showing RSS on your site
- Other guides
Whats an RSS feed?
Really Simple Syndication.
An RSS feed (also known as a webfeed) is a way to keep track of website updates all across the Internet. You set up your feed, people copy+paste the url link to their feed reader and bam! easy! simple! They follow you without all the annoyances of social media. RSS are usually either an .xml, .rss or .atom file type. Tumblr, bsky, youtube and a majority of newspapers use RSS.
Why should I use RSS?
Have you ever rushed to make a post on social media and instantly noticed a typo right after? Have you ever uploaded a piece of art and instantly seen a mistake? And people are already reposting it, liking it and you're stuck in this loop of oh it's taking off versus I need to fix this thing!!!
RSS doesn't have this problem. You pick when you update your site and it's sent to people's reader. There's no limit on length, or links. You can accumulate a bunch of updates and post them all as one RSS post. You can take the time and really finalize what you're doing on your website and then choose to update your RSS when it suits you.
You'd be surprised how popular RSS still is, just not in our artistic circles! But with podcasts, YouTubers, bloggers, Content Creators (tm)... It's still massive! I personally find myself disappointed when I find a cool new website and it doesn't have an RSS feed! But, that's what bookmarks are for :o)
RSS is a slower pace. You're not going to get lost. A lot of feeders include functions like folders and the ability for people to turn on notifications.
Can't this be an email?
Emails are great as well! But maybe you don't want to flood people's inboxes just for site updates. You can still do a newsletter as well.
Consider emails for bigger announcements, a new product, something you DON'T want people to miss, or is time sensitive.
How do I see RSS?
You need an RSS reader/feed reader. Here's a few below:
How do I add an RSS to my feed?
Let's find them!
On the indie web, there's lots of different ways to display you have an RSS feed.
Many will either have a text link, an RSS image, on their footer or an updates/changelog page. That's where you'll usually find them.
When you click on them, you'll see a page like this.
I'm showing you my RSS feed.... we're so close now...!! We're blood sisters!
Then simply copypaste the url and add to your feedreader of choice. You're done! It's that simple.
How do I make one?
Note: you can have as many RSS feeds for your site as you wish! You can have one for blogging, one for art only updates, one for site updates.... Or just one with everything on it!
Let's get our file set up! You can open whatever editor you prefer, or notepad. Save it as an .xml. You can call it "feed.xml" or "rss.xml".
Put this .xml file into the main, topmost folder of your site.
Okay, let's go step by step!
A good idea is to keep a blank template on notepad or in another file for ease of access.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>RSS Title</title>
<description>describe your rss feed here.</description>
<link>http://www.example.com/main.html</link>
<ttl>1800</ttl>
<item>
<title>Example entry</title>
<img src="YOUR IMAGE PATH"/ ></img>
<description>where you put your updates! you can use html tags here.</description>
<link>http://www.example.com/blog/post/1</link>
<pubDate>Sun, 6 Sep 2009 16:20:00 +0000</pubDate>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>
channel
You channel is the feed, and then you place "items"/updates inside of it.
title name your channel, it can be the same title as your website so people know its yours!
description describe your feed! is it for art, site updates?
link link to your main site.
ttl time to live. The number of minutes your feed goes without a refresh. This is always in minutes. A lot of RSS feeds set this to 60 (one hour), but you can set it to three hours (180) or a day (1440).
These are not the only elements you can have, here's a list of all channel elements you can use!
item
title title of the item/update.
img you can add an image. Don't forget to close the tag!
description What's the update? Describe it here. You can use html styling here.
link link to the update page (a blog, new piece of art?)
pubDate you need a timestamp for your items. It's in a RFC 822 format. You can geneate one here. You only have to do it once, then you can just manually update it for each new item once you have the formatting.
Here's a link of all item elements.
When you have another update, add a new < item > tag. You can have a never ending list, or delete other items as you wish.
You can check put more tags you can add, and more detail about rss here.
How do I know it's working?
Open up your .xml file in your browser when it's uploaded onto your webhost of choice. If something's wrong, a error will pop up and tell you what needs fixing:
Showing your RSS on your site
Don't wanna do double time? There's a solution!
You can make divs to style with css and pretty them up, such as kayleerowna's rss page.
If you pay for neocities/nekoweb/use another host, you can use
I don't wanna do all that/I find it difficult.
So do I. I'm not much of a coder, and I've had my RSS feed for almost a year and I STILL struggle with bits. But luckily... You can look at other people's feeds. See how they set them up. I've seen scumsuck create a Tumblr for updates and then host the blog via iframe (tumblr has rss, just add /rss to any tumblr blog url). That's an option.
nomnomnami has a bsky update account where (I assume) she's simply made an image template and copypastes her updates there (Unless she automates them then please tell me.). bsky also has rss (again, /rss to the end of your account). Many NSFW artists with websites post screenshots/crops of their work onto social media and then link back to the full post on their site in the description. Plenty of options!
If you use a site builder like hugo, RSS is included. So does 11ty blog template strawberry starter. So you may want to do more research in site templates if blogging is your main thing.
There's always going to have to be some level of effort with websites. You get out what you put in. Socmedia is good because it's so, so easy to post there. But, it has its massive drawbacks. Due to UK's new laws, and soon the EU, xitter just banned people from seeing nsfw. Overnight. So goodbye to people's incomes?? Maybe it'll delete itself overnight, as Vine did, as LiveJournal did, as all those Google services people loved did. Who knows how long itchio has at this point. Bsky's time is also ticking. I'm trying to tell you; set up a home base on the web, and you can easily jump around when these sites fail. And they always fail. (27/12/2025 update: and xitter just added their ai art feature so like. lol.)
I think giving another way of being online a shot is better for me then playing into the nazi anime waifu xitter. Yes. I'm going to moral post about that, because it's INSANE PEOPLE ARE STILL POSTING THERE!! YOU'RE AT THE NAZI BAR!!! YOU CAN LEAVE!!
Other guides
Don't understand what I'm saying? I left something out? Here's more guides:
If you're more techy then me (which you probably are), here's some other ways to post your RSS:
- RSS to bsky bot
- feedcord posts your RSS (or any) to discord via webhooks.
- UPDATE 29/08/2025: SCUMSUCK has made a guide on how to add rss feeds from ao3, twitter, tumblr, matsdon and more! They go in depth on using the desktop client Thunderbird.
Hope that helps you getting started with RSS! (youtuber voice) Link them in the comments ;w; I love following other webdevs, and you can follow my RSS feeds here!
--xoxo becky