A blog post documenting the process of building a redesigned #RSS feed in human-readable form.
Things I'm happy to have added to my feed, besides the styles:
- author contact information always visible at the top.
- a 'reply via email' link always visible at the bottom.
Several people are using the latter in their feeds, very few are using the former.
The source code is up for grabs. Built with #Jekyll, it should be fairly easy to adapt to #Hugo and other SSGs.
https://minutestomidnight.co.uk/blog/build-a-human-readable-rss-with-jekyll/
@m2m Very cool :)
@aral thanks Aral, I very much care about the small web, so I think every little bit of code towards an improvement in that sense is time well spent :)
@m2m One of my first web dev jobs in the 00s was mostly based around templating static websites using XML generated from Excel spreadsheets, coupled with XSLT.
I still get an uneasy feeling when I see anything relating to Xpath!
@m2m this is awesome, definitely making me want to do something similar on my blog!
@CrowderSoup Thanks Aaron!
@remaster thanks Daniel!
@m2m do people do anything to help minimize the spam problems likely to happen with a mailto: link?
@alienghic I do nothing. My email goes through Protonmail and so far only a couple of spam passed through to my inbox. Overall they do a pretty good job with the filtering.
Mine is just all Jekyll and Liquid, I didn't XSLT it.
It's my only "blog view", there's no web version. People were clicking the posts individually in https://idiomdrottning.org/about and many years later I made that Atom-based blog view, and a little bit later I made https://idiomdrottning.org/texts .
I'm super happy if people use RSS readers or planets.
@Sandra just checked it on Safari (v15.4 on macOS) and indeed it asks me if I want to open my default RSS reader. I guess that might be Safari's default behavior when the feed is just XML? I see your syntax is different from mine.
@m2m Totally forgot about this possibility with RSS. Inspired by your implementation I built a similar xsl for the rss feed in my hugo theme. Great work!
@gabmus thanks. I love Jetbrains Mono btw, it's my code editor font :)
@Saket @m2m Sure, it's all in my theme's repo: https://gitlab.com/gabmus/hugo-ficurinia
It needs some fiddling around with hugo tho, so here are some instructions:
- Put your xsl file in /assets/ and call it feed_style.xsl
- You'll need to include my partial /layout/partials/build_assets.html at the top of your /layout/_default/baseof.html
- You will be able to include the xsl in your rss file with the path /feed_style.xsl
If you need anything else, do let me know!
@m2m Oooh I might tinker around with this + hugo tomorrow. Have been meaning to redo some stuff anyway
@m2m I remember being so excited about the possibilities of XSLT back in the early 2000s. Sigh