From RSS to Atom
16 hours ago
- The author switched their website from RSS to Atom feeds in 2026, acknowledging they are about fifteen to twenty years late.
- The change was made impulsively during a break from algebraic graph theory studies, using Common Lisp, and took about an hour to implement.
- The key change involved replacing the 'key' attribute with a 'uuid' attribute in posts to meet Atom feed requirements for URI-based IDs.
- Atom feeds offer explicit content type support (e.g., HTML, XHTML), which is a significant advantage over RSS 2.0.
- Only new posts after the migration are included in the feed to avoid spamming subscribers, since older posts would appear as new unread items.
- Web feeds remain a major traffic source for the author's website in 2026, alongside newsletters and search engines.
- The author provides examples of resulting feeds and references resources like W3C Introduction to Atom and RFC 4287.