I had a few emails recently asking if my site had an RSS feed. I have never used RSS and had no idea. Went into Squarespace settings, messed around for 2 mins, it gave me a button and set it all up for me. Honestly I thought it was already dead until I had those emails come in...
When sending such emails I always include a tiny example of a minimum item rss feed. "If you take whatever code you have that spits out text files that are html documents it shouldn't take long to have it spit out text files that are rss feeds."
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>hacker news</title>
<link>https://news.ycombinator.com</link>
<description>Description of website</description>
<item>
<title>newest article title</title>
<link>https:// link to article</link>
<description>first few lines of article</description>
<pubDate>Publication timestamp according to RFC 822 like: Thu, 1 Apr 2060</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>slightly older article title</title>
<link>https:// link to article</link>
<description>first few lines of article</description>
<pubDate>Date</pubDate>
</item>
<!-- and any number of extra <item>'s here. -->
</channel>
</rss>
Then include this some place in the head of the index for auto discovery.
The number of items suggested in the email should depend on the type of website. If it is a news website 1 day should be fine. A busy forum the most recent 20 or 30 items. Be biased about it :0)
There is lots more to know about feeds but the above is really all they need to use it. Things like, pubDate is not required but a feed without it isn't worth much. RSS aggregators should accept RFC 822 dates with 2 year digits. They don't have to know that. Such details only make implementation less likely.
I had a few emails recently asking if my site had an RSS feed. I have never used RSS and had no idea. Went into Squarespace settings, messed around for 2 mins, it gave me a button and set it all up for me. Honestly I thought it was already dead until I had those emails come in...