RSS Powers: Activated

I started moving my site from alanwsmith.com over here to al9000.com earlier this year. I started with basic pages. The first blog post came in April. That post is called I'm Not Ready to Start This Blog¹. One of the reasons I wasn't ready was I hadn't built an RSS feed for the site yet².

As of yesterday, the RSS feed is operational. There's still work to do. Things like adding a little header to posts that feature JavaScript based features that won't work in most feed readers. All that stuff will come in time. The important part is the basics are in place and ingestible now.

You can pick it up on this page.

-a

Endnotes

• Right now, the feed only contains blog posts. One feature on the TODO list is to provide a way to include other pages into it as well. For example, I don't want to have to make a separate blog post for projects (e.g. my QR Code Clock). I just want them to show up in feed.

• Careful observers will note: the feed isn't actually RSS. It's Atom. I'm using that format because it has an RFC. As far as I can tell, RSS does not. With the vastness of technology, I'm sure there are cases where the difference matters. I'm not aware of them. Nor am I worried about them.

  Past me worried about the fact that I called it an RSS feed even though it's Atom. I've grown less pedantic. Folks are more familiar with the term RSS. Atom works in readers. That's all I need.

Footnotes

• ¹ I'm Not Ready To Start This Blog - in which I make the first post on this site just to get started. The only thing I really had set up for it was the folder and the naming convention I'm using for the page addresses/urls.

  I could have waited until I was "more ready". That way lies dragons. The big one of paralysis by perfection, in particular.

• ² this site is built from a custom site builder I'm building specifically for it. The builder is very much an early work in progress. The general advice is not to make your on site builders. After a decade and a half working on the web I disagree with that for those with the skill set to make their own.

  It's slower to start, but the time you spend on it is like compounding interest over time. Especially compared to the never ending treadmill of jumping to new frameworks.