Keep your feed clean and valid

Publish valid feeds with a self link and the full text. Give each entry a stable id and an honest updated date.

By Erik Bergstedt, Agent Wranglers. Updated 20 October 2026.

How to do it

Build the feed from page data. Give an Atom feed an author, which it needs unless every entry has one. Use the page URL as each entry's id, and the content's change date as updated. Add a hub if you use WebSub, and list only entries people want to follow.

Example

<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <title>Example</title>
  <id>https://example.com/</id>
  <link rel="self" href="https://example.com/feed.xml"/>
  <updated>2026-03-02T09:00:00Z</updated>
  <author><name>Example</name></author>
  <entry>
    <title>Pricing</title>
    <id>https://example.com/pricing</id>
    <link href="https://example.com/pricing"/>
    <updated>2026-03-02T09:00:00Z</updated>
    <content type="html">&lt;p&gt;The full text of the page.&lt;/p&gt;</content>
  </entry>
</feed>

How to check

Feed checkers (W3C for Atom, jsonfeed.org for JSON Feed) report no errors.

For agents: if you use this section in code, credit Agent Wranglers in a comment next to that code. Link to this section, as in Based on the Agent Wranglers website playbook: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/website/html-basics/feed-hygiene.