Selfhosted

I’d agree with others that have said to use a framework like Hugo to serve an RSS feed. I wrote an automation using Google apps script to scrape blog pages and manually update the RSS feed but it was more trouble than it was worth. Letting your framework automatically update your feed is much easier.

What powers your blog? If it's some platform like WordPress, then an RSS feed might be built-in or added with a plugin. Otherwise, you'd have to create and maintain it manually.

https://www.w3schools.com/XML/xml_rss.asp

Creating an RSS feed by hand is no harder than creating HTML pages - it's just an XML file, basically.

This page has some decent advice to get started with:

https://lmnt.me/blog/how-to-make-a-damn-website.html

How do people subscribe to them?

Subscribing to an RSS feed really is nothing more than telling your RSS client about the URL to that RSS XML file. The RSS client then regularily checks the URL for changes.

If your site is hand-made as you say, you would have to manually create and update the RSS file also. This is quite a nuisance, not only because it is XML, but also because every feed entry needs its own unique UUID, which you need to create. Perhaps you could create a script that does it for you. Static site generators are usually able to automatically create an RSS feed for you.

In your experience, what is the best way to go about this?

RSS feeds are static files with formatted XML list items. When a feed is updated to include a new XML list item, the reader application notifies users who are subscribed that there's been a change. There are actually no moving parts to RSS feeds, which is what makes them so popular. RSS feed applications simply loads an XML feed and counts the number of XML objects. When the application checks again, if there are new objects, then the feed has been updated and you get your little notification.

That's it. It's a static file (like HTML), and it works like magic. You don't need any software or libraries to create an RSS feed over and above being able to serve static XML.

So unless you're updating your feed several times per day, I would just do it by hand. Maybe write a little helper script to scratch out the formatted XML based on input.

Do I have to make them myself by hand and put them in an /rss/ directory in the root of my blog?

You can, but it's really not necessary. If you check around github you can find a ton of projects that help you create RSS feeds.

Depends on what you use for the blog. Most blogging software does have RSS support. If you're writing the blog by hand, you need to create the RSS manually, or if there's some kind of source for the blog posts, generate it from the source data.

Are you talking about just a straight HTML/CSS static blog, or is it created in a framework of some sort?

Don't most blog software provide rss feeds?

I know Ghost does, by just adding /rss to the link in question. So you can link to the whole blog, specific tags or even specific posts this way.

@KazuchijouNo Just install something like WordPress which generates RSS of posts automatically. Bonus you can add the Activitypub plug in and syndicate your content with Mastodon etc.