Adding an RSS feed to your blog, and why it still matters

RSS is a plain XML file listing your latest posts. Feed readers subscribe to it, newsletter tools turn it into emails, and many aggregators and AI tools read it to find new content. It takes an hour to add and nothing to maintain if it is generated.

A minimal valid feed

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <title>Example Blog</title>
    <link>https://example.com/blog/</link>
    <description>Posts about cold brew at home.</description>
    <item>
      <title>How to make cold brew at home</title>
      <link>https://example.com/blog/cold-brew-at-home/</link>
      <guid>https://example.com/blog/cold-brew-at-home/</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Sep 2026 09:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description>The jar method, step by step.</description>
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>

Make it findable

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
      title="Example Blog" href="/blog/rss.xml">

Put the tag in the head of every page. Feed readers and browser extensions look for it when someone pastes your site's address.

Common mistakes

• Relative links inside items. Feed readers need absolute URLs.
• Dates in the wrong format. RSS wants RFC 822 dates, as above.
• Unescaped characters. An ampersand in a title breaks the whole feed; escape it or use CDATA.
• A guid that changes when you edit a post, which makes readers show it as new.

How many items

Feeds usually list the latest ten to fifty posts, not the whole archive. Readers only need what is new since they last checked, and a short feed stays fast to fetch and parse.

Validate it

Run it through the W3C Feed Validation Service before announcing it. Then generate it at build time from the same data as your posts, like the sitemap. Adding a blog to Next.js shows where it fits, and a sitemap for a static site covers the sitemap.

SEO Blog Writer includes RSS in the blog it builds, alongside the sitemap entries, head tags and JSON-LD, so every new post appears in the feed without extra work.