joosh's RSS Tutorial

Want to be fancy with an official Nekoweb RSS feed? You've come to the right place.

Important Notes
Example Code
Setup
Frequently Asked Questions

Important Notes

You need to have the following tags in your RSS feed or it will NOT work.

TITLE
LINK
GUID
PUBDATE

Link Tag

The link in your <link> tag needs to be to a unique URL for each post. For example, you cannot have your link be https://example.org/blog for each RSS entry.
If you keep all of your RSS entries on one page of your site, a workaround is to give each entry a unique ID name in your HTML. With this, you can point your link to https://example.org/blog#entry1, https://example.org/blog#entry2 and so on.
The link cannot be to your main index page. For example, it can't be just https://example.org/.

GUID Tag

Your GUID MUST be unique for every post and it must be alphanumeric.
New posts that contain the same GUID as previous posts will be ignored.

pubDate Tag

Your publishing date can be any date you want. If you set it to a date in the future, it will NOT appear on the feed until that date has arrived.

Custom CSS

Custom CSS can be applied in your elements.css file found in your dashboard.
All CSS definitions must start with .post-box.
Paid Nekoweb users can individually style each RSS entry. See the example code below.
- Per-post CSS must not exceed 512 characters.

Example Code

Red tags below in the example code are, as stated previously, COMPLETELY NECESSARY.

You can copy and paste this code for your own use.

<rss version="2.0">
    <channel>
        <title>posts from example.org</title>
        <description>my blog</description>
        <link>https://example.org/blog</link>
		
        <item>
            <title>post 2</title>
            <description>Description of post 2</description>
            <link>https://example.org/post-2</link>
            <guid>post-2</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed 17 Apr 2024, 04:38:00 -0400</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title>post 1</title>
            <description>Description of post 1</description>
            <link>https://example.org/post-1</link>
            <guid>post-1</guid>
            <pubDate>Mon 02 Jan 2023, 06:36:00 -0500</pubDate>
            <style>
                .post-box .post-title {
                    color: red;
                }
            </style>
        </item>
    </channel>
</rss>

Setup

Create an XML file anywhere in your site directory. Mine is in a folder on the root called feed and the file is named feed.xml
- Keep note of the file path, you will need it later.
- The full file path would be, in my example: /feed/feed.xml

Open your new XML file and paste in the example code from above. It will be the easiest way to do this.
1. Change the content of the first <title> tag to the title of your website.
2. Change the content of the first <description> tag to a description of your website.
3. Change the content of the first <link> tag to the URL of your website blog.

Each of your RSS posts will be wrapped in an <item> tag. This is necessary to separate entries.
From top to bottom, change the data for each the tags in your <item> tag to fit your needs.
1. <title> will be for the title of your RSS entry.
2. <description> will be for a short description of what your RSS entry is about. This tag is optional.
3. <link> will be for the unique web URL of your RSS entry.
4. <guid> will be for the unique ID of your RSS entry
5. <pubDate> will be for the publishing date of your entry.
  - Check the Important Notes section for more information on the <pubDate> tag.

Next, you need to go to your settings page on Nekoweb.
Scroll down to the RSS Feed section.
Put the full path to your XML file in the textbox. Mine was /feed/feed.xml, so that is what I will put in there.
- Note: You do NOT need your full URL (the https://plasma.nekoweb.org), just the path to the file from the root of your website!

Click the "Set" button.
Click the "Manage posts" button. If you did everything correctly, your posts will show up in here.

Check the feed page to see if your posts have appeared

You're all done!

FAQ

My posts arent showing up on the global feed! What am I doing wrong?

Likely nothing is wrong with your XML file itself. There are certain criteria you need to meet in order for your posts to appear on the global feed. This is to prevent spam and to keep the quality high.

I do not know the criteria so I cannot tell you.

My new posts aren't showing up in the manage posts section!

One weird issue that I have noticed is that my posts wont automatically appear. To fix this, I just click the "Set" button in the RSS feed section of settings. This has worked for me every time.

My posts are showing up in the manage tab, but not the feed!

Check to make sure your <pubDate> is correct. If it is in the future, it will not show up on the feed.

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