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How many entries in an RSS feed? And can I create pages for RSS feed?

I am creating an RSS feed for a website I am working on. I read about RSS and it is pretty simple: It is a specially formatted XML file.

However, I could not find information about the following two questions

  1. Is there a limit to the number of entries/items in an RSS feed? Should I have 10 entries only? Or can I go up to 100 for example? What if I have more entries than 100 per day? What can I do?

  2. Can I have pages with each page displaying 10? So for example, www.emample.com/rss/ will give page 1, and www.example.com/rss/2 will give page 2 of RSS, and www.example.com/rss/3 will give page 3, and so on. The reason for this question is the following: If I am restricted to only 10 rss items, what happens if I have 50 items updated to the site since my last RSS update?

Thanks.

Solution

  • Another option is to look at Atom, which is another format read by all modern readers transparently (no one will notice this is Atom or RSS). Atom has pagination as per this RFC. Generally, though, pagination is not widely used to say the least... so you probably don't need to bother too much!

    Whether you pick RSS or Atom, it's useless to make your feeds "too large". Stick to a small-ish number of items, between 10 and 20, depending on how often you publish items.

    Also think about implementing PubSubHubbub which is a fairly simple publish/subscribe protocol which will let anyone interested in your content know that a given feed has updated.