RSS feeds for your articles

A feed is a machine-readable list of your latest articles. People subscribe to it in a reader, and tools use it to pull your articles somewhere else: into a newsletter, an intranet, a partner's site. ClickWhale builds one for every publication category, plus one covering everything, and keeps them up to date without you doing anything.

You don't have to switch feeds on. They're always there, at a fixed address. What you choose is whether to show a link to them on your pages.

The addresses

The category part is the name with spaces turned into hyphens, lower-cased and stripped of punctuation. Company news is /feed/company-news; Nieuws & pers is /feed/nieuws-pers.

Rename a category and its feed address changes with it. There's no redirect from the old one: it simply stops working, and subscribers stop receiving articles without being told why. If people are subscribed, treat a category's name as fixed. See Organising articles into categories.

Every page of your site also carries an invisible link to all of these in its head, so a reader or a browser extension can find them on its own. A subscriber can point their reader at your home page and be offered the list.

Showing a feed link on a page

Two elements have a Show RSS feed button property:

Switch it on, and a link labelled RSS feed appears with the list. It's off by default. It's a page change like any other, so publish after switching it on.

The property is hidden on an overview element set to Single item.

What's in a feed

Each feed carries the 30 most recent articles, newest first, and only articles a visitor could see anyway: switched on, not deleted, and inside their publish window.

Per article:

The summary is all the text a feed gets. Whatever you typed in the article's Summary field is what a subscriber reads before deciding whether to click, and what a newsletter tool has to work with. An article with an empty one appears in the feed as a bare headline.

Technically the feed is Atom 1.0, even though the button says RSS feed. Every reader and newsletter tool handles both.

Where the links point

An entry's link is built from the Article page set on the overview element for that category: the same page a visitor lands on when they click an item in the list. If no overview element names one, ClickWhale falls back to any page holding a Publication container.

So a feed's links are only as good as your published site. Two consequences:

• Set Article page on your overview elements. Without it, a feed for a category can end up pointing at whatever article page it found first.
• Publish after adding or moving an article page. The article list in the feed is live, but the address it links to comes from your published site.

How quickly a new article shows up

Within about five minutes, without publishing. Articles are read live and the feed itself is cached for five minutes. The list of categories behind the auto-discovery links refreshes on a similar rhythm.

You only need to publish when you change something structural: the Show RSS feed button property, a new article page, a new overview element.

Using a feed

• Subscribe in a reader. Feedly, NetNewsWire, Thunderbird and others take the address directly.
• Feed a newsletter. Most email tools can build a "latest articles" block from a feed address, so a monthly newsletter assembles itself from what you published.
• Show your articles elsewhere. An intranet, a partner site or an association's portal can pull your headlines in.
• Automation. Tools like Zapier or Make watch a feed and act when something new appears: post to social media, notify a channel, add a row to a sheet.

For any of those, hand over the full address including https://.

Common issues