This documentation is also published as Markdown for efficient machine reading: the whole site is indexed at /llms.txt, and every page has a clean Markdown copy under /_llms/. These are generated from the same source and cost far fewer tokens to read than this rendered HTML.

Skip to main content Skip to navigation
Guides

Publish an RSS feed

Confirm /rss.xml is on, give every post a date so it appears in the channel, and point CanonicalBaseUrl at your production origin so links resolve.

/rss.xml is wired by UseBlogSite and enabled by default — BlogSiteOptions.EnableRss defaults to true. Two things break a working feed: a post missing date: (silently dropped from the channel), and an unset CanonicalBaseUrl (feed links emit relative URLs that aggregators cannot follow). The feed endpoint ships with the BlogSite template; to emit a feed from a bare AddPennington host or any non-blog content type, see Publish a custom feed from a content service.

Before you begin

  • A working BlogSite (see Scaffold a blog with BlogSite if not)
  • Posts under Content/Blog/ that parse as BlogSiteFrontMatter
  • A known production origin (such as https://blog.example.com). CanonicalBaseUrl needs the scheme and no trailing slash

Options

Give every post a date:

The /rss.xml feed builds the channel from posts where Date is non-null, ordered by descending date. A post without date: renders normally at its URL but does not appear in the feed. Use ISO-8601 (2024-01-15) so YAML parses the value as a DateTime.

Minimal front matter for a post that appears in the feed:

yaml 
title: Getting started with Pennington
description: A first-post walkthrough.
date: 2024-01-15
author: Jamie Rivers
tags: [pennington, getting-started]

Set CanonicalBaseUrl to your production origin

The feed prefixes every <link> and <guid> with the canonical base. Use the production scheme and host with no trailing slash:

csharp 
new BlogSiteOptions
{
    CanonicalBaseUrl = "https://blog.example.com",
    // ...
}

Result

/rss.xml returns an RSS 2.0 channel listing every dated post, newest first, with absolute URLs:

xml 
<rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <title>Jamie's Blog</title>
    <link>https://blog.example.com/</link>
    <description>Notes on shipping software.</description>
    <item>
      <title>Getting started with Pennington</title>
      <link>https://blog.example.com/blog/getting-started-with-pennington/</link>
      <guid>https://blog.example.com/blog/getting-started-with-pennington/</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 15 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <description>A first-post walkthrough.</description>
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>

Verify

  • Run dotnet run and fetch /rss.xml. Expect a <rss version="2.0"> document with one <item> per dated post, newest first
  • Inspect one <item>. <link> and <guid> start with the CanonicalBaseUrl, not a relative /blog/... path
  • Posts without a date: field are absent from the channel. When an expected post is missing, add date: to its front matter
  • After a static build (see Build a static site), output/rss.xml exists and carries the same dated items with absolute CanonicalBaseUrl links