Common RSS Feeds Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)

RSS adoption grew fast through 2003, and so did the number of feeds that were technically broken or practically useless without anyone realizing it. Because a bad feed usually fails silently, an aggregator just stops updating instead of throwing an error, many of these mistakes go unnoticed for months. Here are the ones that show up most often, and how to fix each one.

Publishing malformed XML

RSS feeds are XML documents, and XML is unforgiving about small errors: an unescaped ampersand in a title, a missing closing tag or an incorrect date format can cause an entire feed to stop parsing in some readers. The mistake usually happens because the feed is hand-edited or generated by a script that was never tested against real-world content, like a product name containing an ampersand.

The fix is simple and takes about five minutes: run every feed through Mark Pilgrim’s Feed Validator before publishing it, and re-check it after any change to the publishing template. Treat a failed validation the same way you’d treat a broken link on your homepage.

Truncating every entry to a teaser

Many publishers cut each entry down to a headline and one sentence, reasoning that readers would need to click through to the site to read more, protecting pageviews and ad impressions. In practice this makes the feed far less useful, and readers who wanted a lightweight way to scan headlines end up unsubscribing from feeds that force a click for every single item. If protecting site traffic matters to you, consider a middle ground, a solid paragraph instead of one sentence, rather than stripping the feed down to nearly nothing.

Forgetting feed autodiscovery

Aggregators and browser extensions increasingly look for a simple link tag in a page’s header to automatically detect that a feed exists, rather than requiring visitors to hunt for a small orange icon or a manually typed URL. Sites that skip this tag rely entirely on visitors noticing a feed link somewhere in the page design, which most won’t. Adding the autodiscovery tag takes one line of markup and meaningfully increases how many people find the feed without you doing anything else.

Changing the feed URL without a redirect

A surprising number of sites move their RSS feed to a new address during a redesign and simply let the old URL return an error. Every subscriber whose aggregator polled that old address stops receiving updates and typically never notices, since nothing alerts them that the feed disappeared. Any time a feed’s address changes, put a permanent redirect in place from the old URL, exactly as you would for a page that moved.

Letting the feed go stale

A feed that hasn’t updated in weeks signals to aggregators, and to any subscriber who happens to check, that the publisher has stopped paying attention. This usually isn’t a technical mistake so much as an organizational one: someone set up the feed, nobody was assigned to keep it fed with new content and it quietly withered. If nobody owns updating the feed on a predictable schedule, it will eventually stop being worth having.

Picking the wrong version without knowing it

RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 are all in active use, and they aren’t fully interchangeable: RSS 1.0 is RDF-based and structured differently than RSS 2.0, which finalized its specification this year under the Berkman Center at Harvard. Some publishing tools default to whichever version is easiest for them to generate, not the one best suited to the publisher’s needs. It’s worth knowing which version your tool outputs and confirming it renders correctly in more than one popular aggregator before assuming it works everywhere.

None of these mistakes require deep technical expertise to avoid. They mostly require treating the feed as a real product with real subscribers, not a checkbox item added once and forgotten.