This is the first part of a series of posts that I am going to write to help explain technical details of what actually makes up your RSS feed. I am not going to go into the beginner tutorial about what RSS is or how you can consume them.
Today we’ll start with the header. The header, or channel, element helps to describe the feed by giving an RSS reader information about the feed itself. The first element we’ll talk about is the Title.
The title element in an RSS feed’s header is easy – it’s the title of the feed. An example (inside your feed) looks like this:
<title>Get A New Browser</title>
The title is required for your RSS feed to be valid. You can see if your feed is valid by running it through Feed Validator. And you know I love valid feeds. According to the RSS Best Practices if your RSS feed correspsonds directly to a web site, the name should match the name of the site. And as always make sure your title adheres to the proper character encoding (more on this later).
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- What’s in your RSS feed – The Link The last requirement in the channel element is the link...
- What’s in your RSS feed – Optional Channel Elements There are several optional elements in the channel so I’ll...
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Nice post! These are important things to keep in mind, it’s typically easy to forget concerning the easy things once you get consumed by a project.