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
Creating an RSS feed by hand is no harder than creating HTML pages - it’s just an XML file, basically.
This page has some decent advice to get started with:
https://lmnt.me/blog/how-to-make-a-damn-website.html
This is not quite true. As I mentioned in my other comment already, each feed entry needs its own unique UUID. You have to generate such a UUID for every entry.
Per the RSS specification the
guidfield is optional.And if you do want to provide it, any string works. So just count up from 1, use the title, current date or whatever for that field.
Thanks for pointing this out. I thought this had to be an actual UUID. Generating a unique string of arbitrary format manually is certainly much easier to do manually without additional tools.
it can also just be the permalink for the post, which each post ought to have anyway. in RSS you can set isPermaLink=“true” on the guid to indicate it’s a permalink.
It’s pretty easy to create a uuid. There are many ways to do it. Which is best for you would depend on how you’re generating your website.