Oh technomages of c/selfhosted, I come seeking your help once more because anywhere I look there’s people trying to sell me on their service, something-something PODCASTS, or RSS for windows and all that, my brain cannot anymore.
I’ve got a blog I’m serving with nginx, and I would like to implement some sort of RSS feed. I’m pretty much new to the whole thing, but it was recommended to me. I did a bit of research and now I know those are like xml files that you subscribe to.
So, I wanted to know: In your experience, what is the best way to go about this? Do I have to make them myself by hand and put them in an /rss/ directory in the root of my blog? How do people subscribe to them? Got any resources?
I wouldn’t mind writing them by hand actually, my whole website is hand-made, gluten free and organic. (maybe not the last one).
Thanks in advance <3
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.
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.