From RSS to Atom

By Susam Pal on 04 May 2026

Yesterday, I switched my website from RSS feeds to Atom feeds. In case you are wondering whether you have somehow landed on an ancient post from 2010, no, you have not. Yes, this is the year 2026, and I have finally switched from RSS feeds to Atom feeds. Yes, I am fifteen, or perhaps twenty, years too late.

Contents

Impulse Coding

I have always wanted to do this but could never make the time for it. Finally, it happened while I was giving my brain some rest from my ongoing algebraic graph theory studies. That's when I felt like spending a little time on my website and doing a little Lisp to change the feeds from RSS to Atom. I suppose this was impulse coding, a bit like impulse buying, except that I ended up with an Atom feed instead of a new book.

I find it quite surprising that when I have plenty of time, it usually does not occur to me to do these things, but when I am too busy and really short of time, these little ideas possess me during the short breaks I take. My personal website is one of my passion projects. Common Lisp is one of my favourite programming languages. So any time spent on this passion project using my favourite programming language is a very relaxing experience for me. It serves as an ideal break between intense study sessions. It took about an hour to implement the changes needed to make the switch from RSS to Atom. In the end, I could go back to my studies reinvigorated.

In case you are curious, here is the Git commit where I implemented the change from RSS to Atom: 596e1dd. As you might notice, a large portion of the change consists of replacing the key attribute in each post with the uuid attribute. The key attribute value was used as the value of the <guid> element in the RSS feeds. While an arbitrary short string could serve as the <guid> element for the items in an RSS feed, the <id> element of the entries in an Atom feed needs to be a URI. It turns out UUID URNs are a common choice for such a URI. I ran the following shell command to replace all occurrences of the key attribute with uuid: 

find . -type f -name '*.html' -exec sh -c '
  for f do
    sed "s/^<!-- key: .* -->/<!-- uuid: $(uuidgen) -->/g" "$f" > tmp &&
    mv tmp "$f"
  done
' sh {} +

The rest of the changes went into the feed templates and the Common Lisp program that statically generates the feeds along with the website.

For examples of the resulting feeds, see feed.xml and absurd.xml. The first is the main website feed and the second is an example of a tag-specific feed. Yes, the aforementioned Common Lisp program generates a feed for each tag. As of today, the main feed at feed.xml contains only two entries even though this website has over 200 pages. I explain the reason later in Temporary Workaround.

Atom Entries

Here is an example Atom entry from my feeds: 

<entry>
  <title>A4 Paper Stories</title>
  <link href="https://susam.net/a4-paper-stories.html"/>
  <id>urn:uuid:06e5304d-c242-481c-bf94-e23b019b0a36</id>
  <updated>2026-01-06T00:00:00Z</updated>
  <content type="html">
    &lt;p&gt;I sometimes resort to a rather common measuring ...
  </content>
</entry>

The ellipsis (...) denotes content I have omitted for the sake of brevity.

I like how each entry in the feed now has its own UUIDv4. I also like that timestamps in an Atom feed are in the date-time format specified in RFC 3339, which also happens to be a profile of ISO 8601. Further, I like that I can explicitly declare the content type to be HTML. Commonly used values for the content type attribute are text, html and xhtml. If it is html, the content should be escaped HTML. If it is xhtml, the content should be an XHTML <div> element containing valid XHTML. Explicit content type support is likely the biggest advantage of Atom over RSS. In comparison, RSS 2.0 does not specify any way to declare the content type. So feed readers have to inspect the content and guess what the content type might be.

Temporary Workaround

As I mentioned before, as of today, the main feed contains only two entries. That's because only new posts published since the migration to Atom are now included in the feed. This was done to avoid spamming subscribers. The Atom specification's requirement that each entry's ID must be a URI has caused the IDs of every entry to change. If I were to include the older posts from before the change in the feed, then those posts would appear as new unread items. Subscribers can find this quite annoying. In fact, I have received a few complaints about this in the past. So I was careful this time. I have a little one-liner workaround in my site generator to exclude posts published before this change from the feed.

That was the only workaround I had to implement. Fortunately, my feed file had a neutral name like feed.xml, rather than a format-specific name like rss.xml, so I could avoid a URL change and the subsequent overhead of setting up redirects.

Does It Matter?

Does any of this matter today? I think it does. Contrary to the recurring claim that RSS and Atom are dead, most of the traffic to my personal website still comes from web feeds, even in 2026. Every time I publish a new post, I can see a good number of visitors arriving from feed readers. From the referrer data in my web server logs (which is not completely reliable but still offers some insight), the three largest sources of traffic to my website are web feeds, newsletters and search engines, in that order.

On the topic of newsletters, I was surprised to discover just how many technology newsletters there are on the Web and how active their user bases are. Once in a while, a newsletter picks up one of my silly or quirky posts, which then brings a large number of visits from its followers.

Back to the topic of web feeds, there is indeed a decent user base around RSS and Atom feeds. A good number of visitors to my website arrive by clicking a feed entry that shows up in their feed reader. I know this with some confidence by looking at the referer (sic) headers of visits to my HTML pages and the subsequent browsing of the website, as opposed to the isolated and automated fetches of the XML feeds. So there must be a reasonably active base of users around web feeds. It is a bit like being part of an invisible social network that we know exists and that we can measure through indirect evidence.

References

I found these three resources useful while switching to Atom feeds:

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