RSS Is Back, and You Can Too!

April 15th, 2023 | Non-Fiction

After years of being ignored, I finally got around to updating my RSS feed for the site. You can now find the link to the feed in the navbar.

For anyone who might not know, RSS is the old-web way of receiving alerts about updates to your favorite website or whatever. Feed readers would look at feeds and send you an email (or update your feed list on a website, etc) when a site in your list was updated. Depending on the individual RSS feed for a given site, you might be able to access all of the content directly in one aggragated place as well, effectively creating a one stop shop for all the internety things you want to eyeball.

The current web still uses this technology all over the place; probably most notably with podcast distribution. The reason why a podcast basically just needs to be hosted in one place and then will pop up on iTunes, Google, Stitcher, and like 50 other sites is because of RSS.

I still use RSS to follow online content and I have a pretty extensive list of feeds I subscribe to, although to be honest it's mostly running sites and weird art blogs at this point. I use Blogtrottr for my feed notification service. It's free and I recommend it to anyone who is okay having new post updates sent directly to their email. I use a dedicated email account just for RSS feeds because it'd probably be too cumbersome if it went to my "life" email.

I'm not a programmer or anything, but RSS is pretty straight forward to update and keep updated if you just want a very general and basic result for your own website. In the spirit of the diy ethos that keeps me loving Neocities and all (most) of the sites in this community, I tried making my own little RSS-feed-maker-thing. I threw together a google sheet that lets me input a few criteria and it spits out a copy+pasteable html string for my xml feed.

Here's a snapshot of the sheet:

And here's the link to the RSS Maker sheet.

You can't edit it directly but you can download a copy and then use that for your own RSS feed needs. This, again, will only throw out a very basic version of a feed item, but hey, it works, and it's easy, and I made it myself. This last sentence had six commas in it because I'm a bad writer.

There's still a few kinks to work out (the time/date stuff isn't perfect but it won't break anything either) but for now this works just fine.

Anyone interested in learning more about RSS feeds and how they work and how to make your own (but like, a good version) should google it because I'm an idiot and can't help you.