I've never dealt with RSS before on a personal level. I've pretty much always used social media to discover blog posts. I'm wanting to set up RSS for my personal blog but since I have no experience, looking for some guidance for best practices. I'm currently setting up a script to automatically update the xml when I publish new posts.

Am I supposed to include the entire post in the description field? Or just a summary? How do I handle the markup and formatting of the post?

Am I supposed to delete items from the feed or do I just keep appending items to the bottom of it?

Its it good practice to include a thumbnail image or anything with the item in the feed? How is that possible.

How do I distribute the feed beyond adding a button on my site?

Thank you in advance to anyone for their advice.