The RSS Feed Builder

Build an RSS feed

Follow the steps below to build your feed, choosing the type of content and the time period you want to monitor.

To create a customized RSS feed:

1. Choose the help icon  at top right of the screen, then choose Feed Builder

2. Select the content types you want in your feed.
   Check Mail if you want to know when the email archive is updated. (See the overview of mail archives in Confluence.)

3. Select one or more spaces from the list

4. Click Advanced Options to set the following:

   Option	Description
   Feed Name	The default name is based on the name of your Confluence installation. For example, 'Extranet RSS Feed'.
   With these labels	Enter one or more labels separated by spaces or commas. Confluence returns all content (of the selected types) that matches one or more of the labels. See the hint below about using labels to customize your feeds.
   Exclude these spaces	Exclude specific spaces from those already selected.
   Sorted by	While you can choose to sort by creation or the date they were last updated, there is a known issue where the feed is always sorted by the last updated date. See CONFSERVER-52542 - Getting issue details... STATUS .
   Limit to	Specify the number of items returned in your feed.
   Within the last	Specify how old items returned can be.
   Include content for pages	Specify whether the entire page is displayed in the feed.

5. Choose Create RSS Feed
6. Drag or copy the link into your RSS reader

Hints

• Separate feeds. Try building separate feeds, one for pages only and one that includes comments as well. This allows you to monitor only pages if you are short of time, and to read the comments when you have more time.

• Labels to customize your feed. You can use the RSS feed builder to track updates to labeled pages and comments on those pages. Here is an idea for customizing your RSS feed by using your own personal label(s). This is useful if you want to track updates to specific pages or blog posts, and you do not want to deal with emails. You can use this method as an alternative to watching pages.

  • Build an RSS feed that returns pages, blog posts and comments labeled with a personal label, such as 'my:feed'.
  • Each time you want to 'watch' a page, just label it with 'my:feed'.
  • All updates and comments will automatically come through your RSS feed.

Notes

• Removing an RSS feed: 

  There is no need to try to delete or remove an RSS feed built by the Confluence RSS feed builder.

  Explanation: The feeds generated by the RSS Feed Builder are dynamically generated via the parameters included in the feed URL (address). For example, take a look at the following feed URL:

  
  http://confluence.atlassian.com/createrssfeed.action?types=page&sort=modified&showContent=true...
  

  The above feed URL will generate a list of pages ('types=page'), sorted by the modification date and showing the page content. The feed is generated at the time when the URL is fetched and there is no RSS feed information stored on the database. For that reason, there is no need to remove anything.

• Feed authentication options: Confluence can offer you the option of an anonymous feed or a feed that requires authentication.
  • An anonymous feed will show only the content that is visible to anonymous users. The feed URL does not contain the &os_authType parameter mentioned below. This feed is useful only if your Confluence site allows anonymous access. If a feed is anonymous, you only get anonymously-viewable content in the feed regardless of whether you are a Confluence user or not.
  • An authenticated feed requires you to log in to Confluence before you can retrieve the content. The feed URL contains the following parameter: &os_authType=basic.
  • The option to choose between an anonymous and an authenticated feed is currently not available on the feed builder screen. The feed builder offers only authenticated feeds. See CONF-21601 for details and a workaround.