RSS
A syndication format letting readers subscribe to a site without an intermediary.
RSS — and its sibling Atom — is an XML format publishing a list of items with titles, links, dates, and content, so that a reader application can poll a site and present new entries. It is the web's original subscription mechanism and remains the only widely-implemented one that involves no platform between publisher and reader.
Its persistence is a matter of properties rather than nostalgia. A feed is a static file. It requires no account, no algorithm, and no permission. Nothing about it can be changed by a third party, and a reader's subscription list is theirs. Podcasting runs on it entirely.
Implementation is simple enough to be worth doing by hand: generate the XML in the same pass that generates the site, one feed for everything and optionally one per tag. The details that matter are stable item identifiers, correctly formatted dates, absolute links, and — the perennial bug — properly escaping content so that markup in a post does not break the document.
Because the format is machine-readable and low-friction, it is also a decent general-purpose data channel: any list of dated items with links can be published this way.
See also4
Hand-picked in the note itself — the neighbours worth reading next.
Static Site Generation
Rendering every page to a file at build time, so serving is just handing over bytes.
Web Platform12 connections
Structured Data
Machine-readable markup describing what a page is about, in a shared vocabulary.
Data & Content10 connections
Search Engine Optimization
Making content discoverable through search, most of which is ordinary quality work.
Data & Content15 connections
Markdown
A plain-text formatting syntax designed to be readable as written, now the default for technical writing.
Data & Content11 connections
Related6
Nearby in the graph rather than deliberately chosen. Looser, sometimes surprising.
Linked from5
Notes elsewhere in the wiki that reach for this one.
- FrontmatterData & Content
A metadata block at the top of a text document, separated from the body by delimiters.
- MarkdownData & Content
A plain-text formatting syntax designed to be readable as written, now the default for technical writing.
- Search Engine OptimizationData & Content
Making content discoverable through search, most of which is ordinary quality work.
- Static Site GenerationWeb Platform
Rendering every page to a file at build time, so serving is just handing over bytes.
- Structured DataData & Content
Machine-readable markup describing what a page is about, in a shared vocabulary.