Alerts are for you; a feed is for readers. When you run a site, a mailing or an industry digest, a feed of what was published removes the manual copying: the product itself serves a ready stream of news in a form programs understand.
Why a feed
A feed is an address from which any news-reading program takes your published material. That way one and the same content works in several places at once: on the site, in the mailing, in an aggregator, in someone else’s reader. Nothing has to be rewritten by hand — published through the product, it is already in the feed.
Three formats
- RSS 2.0 — the most widespread format; almost every reading program understands it.
- Atom 1.0 — a stricter variant of the same thing.
- JSON Feed 1.1 — the same news list, in a format convenient for programs to read.
The content of all three is the same — only the notation changes. The format is chosen right in the address: .xml, .atom or .json.
The address and the token
Every feed has its own address of the form:
https://your-address/feeds/news.xml?token=YOUR_TOKENThe token is a long password in the address. It is verified every time, and compared in a way that nothing can be guessed from the response time. When the token is wrong or missing, the feed answers “not found” — exactly as if it did not exist. That way a stranger learns neither that you have a feed at all, let alone its content.
Feeds are created with a token only: a publishing target without a token will not save. There are no open “for everyone” feeds in the product — that is deliberate.
What gets into the feed
- Up to the 50 latest published items, newest on top. The old leaves the feed by itself.
- The full text, not only the title: the reader gets the whole note.
- Only what was published. Drafts and unpublished items do not get into the feed.
Stable entry addresses
Every feed entry has a permanent number that does not change from read to read. This matters more than it seems: without it, reading programs would show your news again after every edit or restart. And when you reworked a publication, that becomes a new entry — readers see it once, not twice.
Token rotation
When a feed’s address leaked somewhere it should not be, the token can be replaced with one action. After the change the old addresses stop working, and you hand the new one to whoever needs it. The former data and the published material are not touched.
How often the feed updates
The feed is served with permission to store the answer for five minutes. In practice this means: a new publication appears for readers within a few minutes, and frequent requests create no extra load. For news, that is more than enough.
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