lastmod

The field every publisher fills in and nobody reads, served as an RSS feed.

The seam

<url>
  <loc>…/p/beating-a-dead-pandemic</loc>
  <lastmod>2025-08-29T13:42:00Z</lastmod>
</url>

Beating a dead pandemic

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 13:42:00 GMTthedakotascout.com

The slug becomes the title. The timestamp becomes the date. Nothing else is copied — every item links straight back to the publisher.

Why

Nearly every publisher ships a sitemap.xml, because Google asks for one. Far fewer ship a feed.

A sitemap already carries the two fields a feed needs. This reads them, sorts by date, and hands you a URL your reader understands.

Feeds

Paste one into a reader. Feeds are curated, not open to the public — each is rebuilt from the publisher’s sitemap on request and cached for 15 minutes.

How

<lastmod>
Items are ordered newest first. A news sitemap’s <news:publication_date> wins over <lastmod> where both exist, and dates more than two days in the future are discarded — plenty of sitemaps have broken clocks. A date with no time is set at noon UTC, so it falls on the right day wherever you read it.
<loc>
Titles come from <news:title> where a publisher provides it, otherwise from the URL slug. A feed can read the pages a sitemap left untitled for their real titles and times.
4xx / 5xx
A feed with zero items is worse than a failure: you subscribe, and it shows nothing forever. An unreachable sitemap or filters that match nothing return a real status and a message instead.