Guides

RSS feed

Every newsletter with a website has an RSS feed with the full text of its issues. Readers follow it in any feed app, without an email address, and it works as a way to move your archive somewhere else.

Where it is

The feed is /feed.xml on the newsletter's website: https://your-slug.example.com/feed.xml, on its own subdomain once you've added a domain. Without a shared domain, as on a self-hosted server, it is https://flockstack.io/archive/your-slug/feed. The website links to it in its footer and in the head of every page, so feed apps find it from the website's address alone.

In every page's head

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Your newsletter" href="https://your-slug.example.com/feed.xml">

What it contains

The 30 latest issues, newest first, as RSS 2.0. Each item has the subject, the issue's address on the website, the date it went out, the author, a short description and the whole issue as HTML in content:encoded. Each item's guid is the issue's ID, so it stays the same when the website moves to your own domain.

Issues you unlist from the website (the campaign's archive setting) are not in the feed, and neither are issues that aren't free. Drafts and unsent issues never are. A website that is off, or that has no issue yet, has no feed.

Caching

Feed apps check often, so the feed answers ETag and Last-Modified, and a repeat request with If-None-Match gets 304 Not Modified without the body. It allows caches to keep the file for 15 minutes. A new issue shows up in the feed within that time.