Duncan Wither

RSS Feed Creation

Creating a RSS feed generator for the website is not super difficult to do. Needs some basic things, but you can steal a lot from a template.

Step one is to ensure your HTML is tight. Luckily I had a couple things working my way:

1. The HTML was being generated by pandoc so was naturally clean.
2. The HTML parser I was using (hxselect) provided some feedback.

Main thing is to ensure all tags are shut. Single tag elements (pardon my wording) need a “/>”. For example: Use <br /> not just <br> even though the browser reads it correctly.

• The main reference was the notes W3 provide
• See the example feed they provide.
• Naturally use their validator
  • Check my website

Note:

• RSS descriptions need all the tags purged
• RFC 5322 supersedes RFC 822 (so date -R works on linux).
• This is an excellent (enough) solution to converting the url to the correct formatting.
• The standarf grep doesn’t do non-greedy stuff. Just use another command¹.
• hxselect can select without the tags, and you can put a custom seperators (i.e. a line break) in.
• if you use date add the -u so the whole feed doesn’t chance when you switch between summer time and normal.

My generator runs off the index.md file of the website so I can easily control dates and

Further Reading

See this article on jazzin’ up your feed. I’ve not bothered (as you can see), but you might want to.

Add a line (as per this spec) to the header of your html for autodescovery.