Post RSS Guidelines

Post currently uses the RSS specification to ingest article content into our site, so your feed should conform to the W3C RSS specification and pay particular attention to the fields we will be using to ingest your content.

Publishers must ensure that

The RSS feeds are always available.
Items are added to the feeds in a timely manner; pubDate should typically reflect when it was added to the feed rather than hours old.
There are enough item slots in the RSS feed to cover a minimum of rolling hour’s worth of peak content.

For reference:

Required Channel Level Elements

RSS Element	Notes
title	The name of the channel
link	The URL to the RSS Feed or HTML Webiste corresponding to the channel
language	The language the feed is written in, using ISO-639 language codes. Only English accepted at this time (en-us)
description	Description of the channel

Required Item Level Elements

Each Item is a post/article.

RSS Element	Sub-Element	Notes
title		Title of the item. We will generally ignore special formatting included here
link		URL of the item on the web site
content:encoded		Full article body. <description> is also acceptable in its place.
pubDate		Date of publication. Can be a future date. compliant with the combined ISO 8601 format or the RFC822 standard, including a time zone
guid		Unique identifier. Can be the item URL.
dc:creator		Author(s) of the item
category		Hashtags to include with the article/post
media:content		Used for media (currently only images). Minimum image size should be 600px. Ideally we’d like at least one for the feature image. <enclosure> may also be acceptable, but it lacks caption/credit capability.
media:content	media:text	Optional Caption for the media:content element
media:content	media:credit	Optional Credit for the media:content element

Sample Image encoding

<media:content medium="image" url="https://images.example.com/asdf.jpg">

<media:title><![CDATA[San Francisco in the evening]]></media:title>

<media:credit role="photographer">

<![CDATA[Sam Smith via Getty Images]]>

</media:credit>

</media:content>

Sample RSS Feed

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<rss version="2.0"

xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"

xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"

xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"

xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"

xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"

xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/"

<atom:link href="https://www.example.com/feed" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />

<description>Sample feed for reference.</description>

<item>

<title>Why San Francisco?</title>

<dc:creator>

<![CDATA[Bob Jones]]>

</dc:creator>

<![CDATA[Travel]]>

</category>

<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.example.com/?p=89266</guid>

<content:encoded>

<![CDATA[<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.</p>

]]>