The feed’s location in the site doesn’t matter too much but it will need to be linked in your default.html layout file.

<link href='home_url/site.atom' rel='alternate' title='site_title - Atom' type='application/atom+xml'>

Basic template

Parts that need to be modified to suit the site are marked with explainations in the variables section below.

---
layout: nil
---
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <title type="text" xml:lang="en">site_title</title>
  <link type="application/atom+xml" href="atom_feed_url" rel="self"/>
  <link type="text/html" href="home_url_canonical" rel="alternate"/>
  <updated>{{ site.time | date_to_xmlschema }}</updated>
  <id>unique_feed_identifier</id>
  <author>
    <name>author_name</name>
  </author>
  <rights>copyright_details</rights>

  {% for post in site.posts limit:20 %}
  <entry>
    <title>{{ post.title }}</title>
    <link href="home_url{{ post.url }}"/>
    <updated>{{ post.date | date_to_xmlschema }}</updated>
    <id>home_url{{ post.id }}</id>
    <content type="html">{{ post.content | xml_escape }}</content>
  </entry>
  {% endfor %}
</feed>

Variables

Variable	Description	Example
atom_feed_url	Fully qualified atom feed URL	http://www.growingwiththeweb.com/site.atom
author_name	The primary author/company of the site	Daniel Imms
copyright_details	Copyright details for your feed	Copyright (c) 2012-2014, Daniel Imms; all rights reserved.
home_url	The home URL excluding the / at the end	http://www.growingwiththeweb.com
home_url_canonical	The canonical (best) home URL, ideally include the / at the end	http://www.growingwiththeweb.com/
site_title	Title of the website	Growing with the Web
unique_feed_identifier	Some unique string to identify the feed, ideally include your URL	http://www.growingwiththeweb.com/all_feed

Further customisations

Beefing up <content>

The main section that is usually customised is the <content> element which defines the content of a post/entry/article. If you’re using the excerpt_separator feature then {{ post.excerpt }} could be used in addition to a link so your users will need to click through to the site to read the entire post.

<content type="html">
  &lt;p&gt;{{ post.excerpt | xml_escape }}&lt;/p&gt;
  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="home_url{{ post.url }}"&gt;Read the full article&lt;/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
</content>

Banner ads are another example of something that can be slipped into the <content> element easily.

External posts

I setup an external post system in my blog that allows me to add articles I write externally to the homepage and feed. If the external_url property exists in a post’s YAML header then it will link to the external URL instead of the internally generated page. The feed code for this is as follows:

{% if post.external_url %}
<link href="{{ post.external_url }}"/>
{% else %}
<link href="home_url{{ post.url }}"/>
{% endif %}
<content type="html">
  &lt;p&gt;{{ post.excerpt | xml_escape }}&lt;/p&gt;
  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="{% if post.external_url %}{{ post.external_url }}{% else %}home_url{{ post.url }}{% endif %}"&gt;Read the full article&lt;/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
</content>

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