RSS Feed Generator

What this tool is used for

• Producing a feed for a site that has none, from a list of items.
• Generating a valid feed by hand for a static site with no build step.
• Checking the required element structure before writing a generator.
• Producing a test feed to point a reader at.
• Adding a feed for a section of a site that the main one omits.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the output valid RSS 2.0?

Yes — a channel carrying title, link, description and one item per row is all RSS 2.0 asks for. The W3C feed validator will still warn about a missing atom:link rel="self", which comes from the Atom extension rather than RSS itself and needs the feed's own final URL to fill in.

What format does pubDate need?

RFC 822 with a four-digit year, like Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT. The field is free text and unvalidated here, so a malformed date does not break the feed — readers simply ignore what they cannot parse, which usually surfaces as items in the wrong order rather than an error.

Why are there no guid elements?

Because only the required fields are emitted. Aggregators dedupe on guid and fall back to link when it is missing, so the feed works provided every link is unique and permanent. If your URLs might change, add <guid isPermaLink="true"> copies before publishing so subscribers do not see reposts.

What is lastBuildDate for?

It tells an aggregator when the channel last changed, letting it skip the body when nothing is new. It is stamped with the current time on generation — previously it was hardcoded to 1 January 2024, so every feed this tool produced claimed to have been untouched for years.

Why doesn't a shared link include my items?

The channel fields are URL-bound and the item rows are not, so a link reproduces the feed's identity but not its contents. Download feed.xml to keep the full result — that file is the deliverable, and it is what you upload to your domain.

Common errors and gotchas

• Using a non-conforming date format, which readers silently ignore or misorder.
• Omitting a stable unique identifier per item, so edits appear as new entries.
• Failing to escape ampersands and angle brackets in titles and descriptions.
• Using relative URLs, which break as soon as the feed is read anywhere but the site.
• Serving the feed with an HTML content type, which stops some readers accepting it.