RSS feeds

An RSS feed is an address that a feed reader (Feedly, NetNewsWire, Inoreader and the like) checks for new posts. Readers who follow sites there can follow your publication too, without an account and without an email. Peakub makes the feeds for you, they are on from the start, and you manage them in one place: Tools, then RSS feed.

The feeds

• Your publication's main feed. At /feed/articles on your publication's address, for example your-publication.peakub.com/feed/articles or your-domain.com/feed/articles once your custom domain is verified. It holds your latest published posts, newest first.
• A rubric. At /rubric/<name>-<id>/feed. It holds what is published in the rubric. See Rubrics.
• A series. At /series/<name>-<id>/feed. It holds the published parts of the series. See Series.
• A long form. At /longform/<name>-<id>/feed, one feed for each published long form.

A rubric's, series' or long form's address is the one of its page, followed by /feed.

Where to find the addresses

In the Studio, open Tools and choose RSS feed. The page opens with a summary: the Main feed address with a Copy button, the Status (on or off), the number of Feeds, the Items per feed and the Last item, the date of your latest post. Beside it are three buttons: Settings, Help and Insights.

Below, Paths lists every feed address your publication offers: the main feed, then one per published rubric, series and long form. Each shows whether it is live or off, and has its own Copy button. Open an address in a browser and you see the feed as a reader's app gets it.

Preview lists the first five items of your main feed as readers' apps get them, and tells you what each one lacks: a title, a date, an excerpt or an image. Fix it in the post, and it shows in the feed.

The settings

Choose Settings on the page: it opens the Feed section of your publication's settings window. Three choices apply to every feed at once:

• Feeds on turns every feed on or off.
• Items per feed is how many of your latest posts each feed holds: 10, 20, 30 or 50.
• What each item carries is Title and excerpt or Title only. With the title alone, readers' apps show the title and send people to your publication to read.

Choose Save. The page follows at once.

Turning the feeds off

Switch Feeds on off and choose Save. Every feed then answers "not found", and readers' apps stop updating. Switch it on again to bring them back at the same addresses. Feeds that are off show as such in Paths.

What a feed holds

Each entry in a feed has the piece's title, its date, its author, its cover image when it has one, a link to it on your publication and, unless you chose Title only, a short excerpt: the piece's description, cut at about 280 characters on a word boundary. The feed never carries the full text. A reader who wants to read clicks through to your publication.

The feed's own title, link, language and logo are those of your publication (or, for a rubric, a series or a long form, its name followed by your publication's, and its thumbnail).

What a feed leaves out

• Anything not published. Drafts and removed pieces are not in a feed. A piece appears once it is published.
• Anything not public. If your publication is not published and public, its feeds answer "not found", and so does the feed of a rubric, a series or a long form that is not published.
• Paid and members-only posts. They are never in a feed, not even as an excerpt: a feed holds only public posts. See Access and paywalls.

There is no feed per language: a feed does not follow your variants, and its language is your publication's.

What the insights count

Choose Insights, on the page or in your publication's insights window, to see how your feeds are read over the last 30 days: the fetches per day, which kinds of reader app fetched them (Feedly, Inoreader, NetNewsWire and so on, a browser, a robot or another reader) and which feeds were fetched most.

Read these numbers for what they are:

• They count fetches, not people. A reader app that syncs for all its users fetches once, so one fetch can stand for many readers.
• The kind of app is the one it claims. It comes from the name an app gives when it fetches, and an app can give any name.
• A fetch answered by a cache is not counted. Peakub's pages and some networks keep a copy of a feed for a few minutes, and a fetch answered by that copy never reaches Peakub, so it isn't counted.
• Nothing about the person is kept. No address, no visitor, only the kind of app. If the count can't be reached, the page says it isn't measured rather than showing zero.

Fetches are counted from the day this was added to Peakub, so the history starts there.

How readers subscribe

A reader pastes your publication's address into their feed reader. Feed readers find the feed by themselves, because the pages of your publication announce it in their head: your home page, the About page, articles, zines, events, coverages and the list of articles all point to /feed/articles. The page of a rubric or of a series announces its own feed instead, so pasting the address of a rubric into a feed reader follows that rubric only.

Some feed readers can't discover a feed from an address: a reader can then paste the feed's address itself, ending in /feed/articles or /feed.

Good to know

• A piece you just published, or a setting you just saved, can take a few minutes to show in a reader's app, because feed readers and the networks between keep a copy of a feed for a few minutes.
• Feeds are separate from your newsletter. Subscribing by feed does not make someone a subscriber: you don't get their email, and they don't count among your subscribers.