Adding an RSS feed to my blog


Tags: programming, jekyll, rss, automation

In this post, I explain how I added an RSS feed to my blog.

Why?

RSS is one of those old‑school web standards that never really died. It lets you subscribe to updates from a site in your feed reader, so you don't have to keep checking manually. Since I've been automating LinkedIn posts, it made sense to also expose a feed for anyone who prefers a reader (such as myself).

How?

I created a feed.xml template in Jekyll that loops through all posts and outputs them in RSS 2.0 format. It includes:

  • Title
  • Link
  • Publication date
  • GUID (permalink)

Here's a basic snippet:

---
layout: null
---
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <channel>
    <title>{{ site.title | xml_escape }}</title>
    <link>{{ site.url }}{{ site.baseurl }}/</link>
    <description>{{ site.description | xml_escape }}</description>
    <atom:link href="{{ "/feed.xml" | prepend: site.baseurl | prepend: site.url }}" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"/>
    {% for post in site.posts %}
    <item>
      <title>{{ post.title | xml_escape }}</title>
      <link>{{ post.url | prepend: site.baseurl | prepend: site.url }}</link>
      <pubDate>{{ post.date | date_to_rfc822 }}</pubDate>
      <guid isPermaLink="true">{{ post.url | prepend: site.baseurl | prepend: site.url }}</guid>
    </item>
    {% endfor %}
  </channel>
</rss>

The layout: null is important, as it prevents Jekyll from trying to put the RSS inside an HTML layout.

Now you can subscribe to my feed in any RSS reader and get updates whenever I publish a new post. Between LinkedIn automation and RSS, my blog is starting to feel like a proper publishing pipeline.

That's it: a small addition, but one that makes the blog more accessible. Now I can put my site in my RSS reader (Opera, by the way) and subscribe to it like just another news site!