RSS Tutorial

Blog Feed Guidelines

Summary

You have a Blog. You have considered the options and decided to create the RSS feed. What are the guidelines?

Create one feed, preferably an RSS 2.0 feed.
Validate the RSS feed.
Verify or add the autodiscovery parameters to the blog.
Consider using FeedBurner.

Detail

Create one feed, preferably an RSS 2.0 feed.

Some blog services give the option to create multiple feeds in different versions of RSS and Atom.

If you have the option

Only create one feed.
Create the RSS 2.0 feed.

The only exception would be if you create two RSS 2.0 feeds

One for full feeds.
One for partial feeds.

Validate your RSS Feed.

Validate the feed to make sure everything is correct.
Validate using Feed Validator

After the RSS feed validates,
Proudly display the "RSS Valid" graphic.

Verify or add the autodiscovery parameters to the blog.

The autodiscovery parameters allow browsers and other software to recognize that the blog has an RSS feed and it makes it easier for a user to subscribe.

Verify the autodiscovery parameters if the blog service creates them.

To check, do a view source of your blog and between
<head> and </head> look for the following statements.

If your blog service does not add these statements, add them manually to your blog template.
Reference: How to add RSS Autodiscovery to your site

Consider using Feedburner

FeedBurner is a free service for Feed Publishers. They provide a one-stop, fill-in-the-blanks service for working with your feeds.

Feed burner provides stats, features, and promotion tools for the RSS feed.