These technical tips for publishing a blog focus on how to share content, separate from content quality. Recommendations are ordered by importance with rationale. Using a standardized format is critical for reader and search engine compatibility.
RSS 2 and Atom are the most widely supported formats. Atom is recommended for new feeds due to less ambiguity and a simpler specification. Existing RSS 2 feed owners have little reason to upgrade.
Providing feeds in multiple formats is rarely necessary; switching between Atom and RSS is safe and rarely confuses readers. Content-Type headers must be set correctly: Atom uses application/atom+xml, RSS uses application/rss+xml, and JSON Feed uses application/feed+json. All URLs within the feed must be absolute, starting with https://, to ensure compatibility across readers.
Blog pages should include metadata advertising the feed using link rel=alternate tags in HTML. Multiple feeds can be advertised with specific titles for categories or comments. This allows readers and search engines to subscribe and discover new content easily.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing