What are great ways to add an RSS feed to my website?
3 votes c/freepost Posted by likho — 3 votes, 8 comments — Source

I use pandoc as my html renderer. (My drafts have a yaml front matter and are written in Markdown). I see a lot of talk about RSS feeds in the webweaving community. But there are a lot of ways to make a website, so the accepted inputs for RSS feed generators are all over the place.

2 votes DustDFG

Just a note that freepost has separate comminuty for questions

1 vote zPlus

so the accepted inputs for RSS feed generators are all over the place

Are you sure about this? RSS format is XML. For example this is the template that freepost is using. Any XML library should be able to parse RSS without much problems.

1 vote likho

I don’t see the problem in adding an RSS (or Atom) feed to my site if it helps people revisit. There’s an RSS feed generator on 32-bit cafe that obviously isn’t going to work with my yaml front matter for example.

1 vote zPlus

Sorry I think I’m struggling a little bit with understanding the question. If I understand correctly, you are asking how to add RSS to your website. RSS is basically XML, so you just have to write an XML file. If you’re using pandoc for rendering HTML templates, I think you can reuse the same tool (thus avoiding any other XML library); just write XML tags inside your template instead of HTML.

Does this make sense?

1 vote likho

Not really. unless you provide a sample invocation of what you’re suggesting.

But I found:
https://github.com/chambln/pandoc-rss

1 vote zPlus

How do you generate the HTML? I assume you have a folder containing markdown files (with yaml headers), a template file, and a script that calls pandoc on each single file?

1 vote likho

pandoc by itself doesn’t support RSS, and ChatGPT recommends filters that don’t exist.

When I generate pages, I use a Makefile, and hit make article-nickname when I want to generate a new page. Each recipe is basically this:

pandoc input.md -o output.html

What’s ideal is reducing the number of times I’m copying and pasting the front matter in the yaml.

1 vote zPlus

With pandoc you can use custom templates. Basically like your command, but with an additional --template= argument. The template file will contain your XML and the variables you want to use.