RSS and Atom Feeds
I read The Rise and Demise of RSS and was motivated to syndicate this list of things I write here.
One of the challenges is that typically people use some sort of publishing platform which generates RSS feeds for you. Since this site is entirely static (well, aside from some PHP to keep things tidy on the server side), I have to generate the feed myself. Since it’s just XML, I could in principle do it by hand. However, the pain-point that that would introduce every time I (occasionally) add to this list would almost guarantee that I wouldn’t update it.
To solve this, I wrote a pretty basic script that scrapes this page, grabs all the articles and figures out how to turn them into feed entries. Then it generates a feed with all the relevant metadata and adds each one. The process is still manual, but reduced to a “one-click” deployment.
The code is here. This page is publishing syndicated feeds; you should be able to see it if your browser knows what to do with them. (Firefox looks to be deprecating its live bookmarks functionality. Get Awesome RSS to add the RSS feed back in the address bar.)
Subscribe via RSS or Atom. Or don’t. But do subscribe to other things. It’s such a shame that this technology is going out of favour, but also no accident. We have to fight for the internet we want.