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 also13
Structured Data
Machine-readable markup describing what a page is about, in a shared vocabulary.
Data & Content14 connections
Markdown
A plain-text formatting syntax designed to be readable as written, now the default for technical writing.
Data & Content14 connections
Frontmatter
A metadata block at the top of a text document, separated from the body by delimiters.
Data & Content12 connections
Knowledge Graph
Information modeled as entities and the typed relationships between them.
Meaning & Society17 connections
Incremental Static Regeneration
Serving a cached static page while regenerating it in the background after a chosen interval.
Web Platform12 connections
Static Site Generation
Rendering every page to a file at build time, so serving is just handing over bytes.
Web Platform19 connections
Search Engine Optimization
Making content discoverable through search, most of which is ordinary quality work.
Data & Content29 connections
Server-Side Rendering
Producing a page's HTML on the server so the first response is already content.
Web Platform23 connections
Semantic HTML
Using elements for their meaning, so the document conveys structure without extra description.
Design & Interface24 connections
Progressive Enhancement
Building so the core experience works without scripts, with richer behavior layered on top.
Web Platform26 connections
Blog
A website of dated posts shown newest first, named in 1997 and made easy by tools like Blogger and WordPress, which turned personal publishing into a mass habit before social networks absorbed much of it.
Web Platform9 connections
Sitemap
A list of a website's pages, either drawn for people as a map of its structure or published as an XML file that tells search engines what exists and when it last changed.
Data & Content10 connections
XML
The 1998 tag-based format for structured documents and data that once carried almost everything on the web and still underlies office files, feeds, and SVG, along with a set of well-known parser attacks.
Data & Content9 connections
Linked from8
- BlogWeb Platform
A website of dated posts shown newest first, named in 1997 and made easy by tools like Blogger and WordPress, which turned personal publishing into a mass habit before social networks absorbed much of it.
- 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.
- SitemapData & Content
A list of a website's pages, either drawn for people as a map of its structure or published as an XML file that tells search engines what exists and when it last changed.
- 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.
- XMLData & Content
The 1998 tag-based format for structured documents and data that once carried almost everything on the web and still underlies office files, feeds, and SVG, along with a set of well-known parser attacks.