i’m just gonna say, as briefly as possible, what you need to put where, if you want to write an rss feed by hand. which… isn’t that bad. there are worse things to write by hand.

also, here is a template, to save you copying the parts out of each box individually.

ok lets a go

feed description

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
                   xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">

this just says “im an rss feed”. you put it in verbatim

<channel>

i guess you can have multiple feeds in one file? never seen that. anyway this marks the start of the first/only one

<title> niss's art </title>

title of the site as a whole. when someone adds the feed to their reader this is what gets prefilled in the title there. so plain text only here.

<description> sfw-only art drawn by niss </description>

also plain text.

<link> https://gallery.niss.website/main </link>

link to the site’s home page

<atom:link href="https://gallery.niss.website/main/rss.xml" rel="self" />

put a link to the rss feed itself in the quotes there. technically this line is optional, i suppose.

item description

one of these boys for each thing you want in the feed.

<item>
<title> a really cool picture </title>

(plain text, again.)

<link> https://gallery.niss.website/main/niss/blablabla </link>

link to this specific post

<guid> https://gallery.niss.website/main/niss/blablabla </guid>

any unique, unchanging string. if the url fits those criteria, and it probably does, you can reuse that.

<dc:creator> niss </dc:creator>

that’s you! or me in this case.

<pubDate> Tue, 26 Nov 2024 04:20:00 +0000 </pubDate>

the date has to be in this specific format, which is my least favourite part of rss. the last bit is the time zone.

<description><![CDATA[

<img src=https://gallery.niss.website/main/niss/blablabla/quox.png>

bla bla bla

]]></description>

this is where the post goes, or a summary of it. you can use normal html inside of <![CDATA[ … ]]>—it is specifically a marker saying not to try to interpret the contents as rss.

i can only assume people who say writing rss feeds is hard don’t know about cdata sections?

</item>

end of item. but i guess if you’re writing html you know that.

then at the end

</channel>
</rss>

don’t forget to end the channel and the whole file. and that’s it! happy feeding(??)