Henlo, I've managed to create an RSS feed for this site now! I did it in just about the most cooked way possible, but it worked XD. If you are unaware it's just a way to compile news/posts for viewing with a feed reader (standalone apps, most email clients), saving you from having to visit all of their sites. Can be a 'distraction free', and more specifically tailored way to read this stuff.

I've been using feed readers for a while now, hand in hand with my move away from social media sites, and always make a point of following feeds I come across on Neocities. I have been kind of surprised by how many big commerical sites don't offer them anymore though, even a lot of small-mid sized 'alternative' news outlets don't bother. I guess the expectation is that you follow their facebook/twitter/telegram for updates, but those all require a reader to be logged in to see posts. And if you can load a page without logging in, it'll often scramble the feed so you don't see the latest posts (twitter), or it only lets you scroll down once or twice before locking you out (facebook, instagram, etc.)

Anyway, I wanted to make one for my blog so it's accessible in multiple ways, and like I can't complain about other sites not having a feed when I don't have one ('be the change you want to see' and so on). I also just wanted to learn how it works too, so I can apply it to other sites in the future. While inspecting around at other people's feed .xml's I could see most use a generator that converts posts automatically (a lot of site generation software seems to have it included, or has plugins available). That's the dream (i.e. the best/correct way to do this XD), but I don't use any specific software for this site, just Zonelets blogging code and whatever text editor is on the PC I'm currently using (Mousepad, Xed, Kwrite, Featherpad, it depends). I have come across ZoneRSS before, a tool designed specifically for RSS integration with Zonelets, but after reading through all the documentation I think it would have been way better to have started my blog using that vs. implementing it now. The legacy post integration was confusing, and I didn't really want to use it's in browser post creator/feed updater (very cool feature! but I prefer doing everything locally with templates I already have). I might try out ZoneRSS on another site.

ZoneRSS did link me on to RuSShdown though, and experimenting with that it kinda clicked. I could 'just' convert the body of my posts to markdown then paste it in RuSShdown to generate a feed, and add posts to that feed. It took a little while to convert 29 posts, but the labour was relatively minimal (just Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V and clicking a few dozen times, lmao). This is not an 'optimal' way to generate a feed, but it worked for my situtation. Now that I have done that work, I can just have a copy/paste template for adding new posts to the feed .xml :)

I decided to include entire post text in my feed instead of summaries, this makes the .xml exponentially larger (especially as I am quite verbose), but while reading about RSS stuff online I came across a comment that stuck with me; 'RSS is about user choice'. I want to allow people the option to view my posts however they want. Although I often have in-page relative links ('Jump To'/'Sections') which don't work in a feed reader (at least not how I've done it), I found that feed readers tend to present more text in one go that this site does, so long posts weren't as hard to read. I just added a notice at the top of each post with relative links for RSS readers that says the links won't work (they just direct to the posts URL), this was easier than editing them all individually.

Thanks for reading! here are some random informative links about RSS that I bookmarked while doing this;