What is a RSS feed?

What are some best practices to follow when designing an RSS feed?

  • Should the feed be limited by number of items or a span of days? How many items is the average for an RSS feed? Should the full description be shown? Should media such as images be displayed? Are ads in the feed heavily frowned upon?

  • Answer:

    You can set whatever limit works well for your purposes.  There's no harm to RSS clients in having a large number.  Off the top of my head I think 20 is a typical number of items, but there's lots of variation.  My own site has blog-style feeds with 50 items, and photo feeds with 360 or 180 items.  People like the full description being shown, including thumbnail images.  Most consumers of RSS don't handle Media RSS but do handle images embedded in the description. Different people have different tolerances of ads.  The more value they get from your feed, the more ads they'll tolerate in exchange. Other best practices can be learned by running your feed through http://validator.w3.org/feed/

Bruce Lewis at Quora Visit the source

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