Blog Feed

An Atom or RSS feed for a blog or is still an essential item, and despise the demise of Google Reader, it is still a fundamental aspect of any blog. While blogging is not as popular as it once was, it is still a useful way to keep API consumers up to date with what is happening with change across each API they are depending on.

Also known as: RSS Feed, Atom Feed, Syndication Feed, JSON Feed

Standards

RSS Advisory Board RSS 2.0 Specification
IETF RFC 4287 — The Atom Syndication Format
IETF RFC 5023 — The Atom Publishing Protocol
Community JSON Feed 1.1
W3C WebSub
schema.org schema.org BlogPosting

HTTP Headers

Header	Direction	Spec	Description
`Content-Type`	response	RFC 9110	Identifies the feed media type.
`ETag`	response	RFC 9110 §8.8.3	Conditional-GET support so aggregators can skip unchanged feeds.
`Last-Modified`	response	RFC 9110 §8.8.2	Conditional-GET timestamp; widely used with If-Modified-Since.
`If-None-Match`	request	RFC 9110 §13.1.2	Sent by polite aggregators to avoid re-downloading unchanged feeds.

Media Types

application/rss+xml — De facto media type for RSS 2.0.
application/atom+xml — RFC 4287
application/feed+json — JSON Feed 1.1 advertised media type.
application/xml — Sometimes used as a fallback for RSS/Atom.

Link Relations

alternate — HTML LINK element / IANA Link Relations
self — RFC 4287 §4.2.7.2 (Atom)
hub — WebSub
next — RFC 5005 — Feed Paging and Archiving
prev-archive — RFC 5005

Governance Rules

feed-discoverable-from-homepage (Community convention) — HTML pages link to the feed via .
feed-supports-conditional-get (RFC 9110) — Server honors ETag / If-Modified-Since to reduce aggregator load.
feed-items-have-stable-guid (RSS 2.0 / Atom id) — Each item has a unique, stable identifier so dedup works.

Risk & Compliance

Security: Feeds embedding raw HTML must be sanitized by consumers (XSS into reader UIs). Server-side, parsers historically suffered XXE in XML processing — disable external entity resolution. Avoid leaking unpublished drafts via cached feeds.

Tools

Feed Validator (W3C) — Validation
feedparser (Python) — Parser (BSD-2-Clause)
rome (Java) — Parser (Apache-2.0)
Feedly — Aggregator / reader
Inoreader — Aggregator / reader
NetNewsWire — Desktop / mobile reader (MIT)

Suggested Metrics

feed_freshness_hours — Hours since the most recent item's publish date.
item_count — Number of items currently returned by the feed.
conditional_get_hit_rate — Share of polls answered with 304 Not Modified.
subscriber_count — Reported subscribers (from WebSub or aggregator user-agents).

Example Implementations

Stripe — Stripe engineering and changelog feeds.
GitHub — GitHub Blog and Changelog publish RSS/Atom feeds.
AWS — AWS What's New, Security Bulletins, and service blogs offer RSS.
Cloudflare — Cloudflare Blog and changelog publish RSS feeds.

Related Properties

Blog
Changelog
News
Press