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plumpan
@plumpan

For the love of glob please set up a website with an RSS feed

someone please write a guide on the easiest way to maintain a super barebones RSS feed

I want all of the artists I care about to have an RSS feed

please, fucking please


plumpan
@plumpan

You want "decentralized" internet? You want things to not rely on one rich asshole ruining things for everyone?

RSS feeds. It's fucking RSS feeds. RSS readers still exist, you can find one you like. There's tons of them. Yes, setting up a website, even a very basic one, is a big technical hurdle. I'm sorry, take it up with the rich people. If you're on cohost you have friends that are willing to help. I'm not that friend, I've avoided making a website for eons. But someone will help.

All RSS feeds are is a structured way of going "hey here's all of the posts on this web site". So instead of going to each website, a program can just load all that data in at once. It's really fucking simple.

This is the last thing I'm going to yell about on this website. We need RSS feeds.

and yes most people are not going to post hog on their own website and that sucks, I don't have a solution for general hogposting.


M00se0nTheLoose
@M00se0nTheLoose

I agree with OP, RSS Feeds are great and a good way to go for a decentralized web.

So, if you have a spot to host an RSS feed, this is dummy simple. So simple that when I first saw it I was like "this can not be this simple" but, it is. Below are the steps. It looks long, but I promise a lot of this is just copy paste each time you want to make a post.

Edit 9/9/24 @891 internet time: I'm planning on writing a more in depth step by step tutorial later today or tomorrow I'll link here once it's done.

Edit 9/11/24 @657 internet time: Here is the more in depth post on cohost about how to create an RSS feed. Here is the direct link for the article on my site where it's formatted a bit better.


STEP 1: Find a spot on your computer where you're going to save your RSS feeds. I'd recommend somewhere you can back them up

STEP 2: Create an .xml file. This can be done on windows with something as simple as Notepad, but I'd recommend Notepad++ or Visual Studio Code.

STEP 3: Paste this shit into that file (though please make sure to update it with your own info rather than mine):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/">
<channel>
<title>Tanzi-Media Blogs</title>
<link>https://tanzi-media.com/</link>
<description>Blogs about a whole host of topics, from board games to tutorials.</description>
<image>
    <url>https://tanzi-media.com/Website_Images/moose_grass1000.png </url>
    <title>Tanzi-Media Blogs</title>
    <link>https://tanzi-media.com/</link>
</image>
<atom:link href="https://tanzi-media.com/RSS_Feeds/All.xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />

<item>
    <title>Content Title</title>
    <link>Direct URL to content</link>
    <guid>Unique ID for content. Copy the URL again</guid>
    <pubDate>Wed, 27 Nov 2013 15:17:32 GMT 
    (Note: The date must be in this format)</pubDate>
    <description>Description for your content.</description>
    <category> Blog Category </category>
    <content:encoded><![CDATA[

    ]]></content:encoded>
</item>

</channel>
</rss>

Now, you might be wondering, "Moose, what is all that crap?". It's a template! Everything before

<channel>

I have no clue what it does, but it's important! So leave it.


<title> Is the title of your RSS feed or blog! 

<link> is the link people can find whatever you're posting. Ideally this is a website or something, but I'm not sure if there's anything preventing you from putting a google drive link there or something.

<description> is a description of what your RSS feed is going to have in it!

<image> is if you want an image to be displayed indicating your RSS feed

<atom:link> this should be the link of where your RSS feed is hosted. It's literally the link to where your RSS feed is saved online.

Everything under <item> is the post for each item in your RSS feed

<title> Title for your post or article or whatever

<link> direct link to the specific post you're making

<quid> unique ID. Might as well be the URL

<pub date> it has to be in that format. Use [unix time stamp](https://www.unixtimestamp.com/) to help figure that stuff out

<Description> description for that specific post

<category> A category for your post.

<content encoded> okay, so this section, you'll need to know HTML. It's not that much harder from Markdown. [Neocities has a great tutorial on it](https://www.htmldog.com/guides/html/beginner/). You just copy/ paste the html of whatever post you're making after <![CDATA[ but before   ]]></content:encoded>

(Sorry, hard to post all of that without Cohost taking over formatting)

Basically, each time you make a new post, you copy/ paste an empty version of everything between item and /item, and fill out the new info. New posts go to the top of the RSS feed

But Moose, where can I host all of these feeds and posts?

Neocities. Create yourself a login, organize it how you want, and just drag and drop the RSS feeds or HTML posts. When you have updates to the RSS feeds, just copy and paste the info from the file on your computer into the RSS feed on Neocities (or wherever you're hosting it online). It's important that RSS feeds do not change URL, or else people who are following you will stop receiving updates. You don't even need a full functioning website. You can literally just have a folder in neocities that houses all your html posts, and use it like that. When creating an html or xml file in Notepad or Notepad++ or Visual Studio it's usually as easier as just making the file name "file.html" or whatever you want to call it and that usually takes. You may have to save as and choose the correct format.

But Moose, what if I'm not sure how to format my RSS feeds, or HTML pages?

Just look at other peoples! Here is the feed for my main RSS feed. You can quite literally download it or just see how i've organized things. Similarly, if You're browsing my website and see an article you like or wonder how something is formatted, you can literally just look to see what I did. you just press F12 is most browsers, and it brings up a menu that will show you the HTML and CSS for the website.

Again, I know this all looks/ sounds like a lot but once you're setup it's literally just write post in HTML, copy and paste into RSS feed as a new item, and update the RSS feed as needed.

If anyone has questions, I don't mind trying to answer them. Contact info is on my website but also steventanzimedia@gmail.com


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in reply to @plumpan's post:

in reply to @M00se0nTheLoose's post:

hugo and jekyll both do, and they're (if you are able to run something on a CLI at all) fairly straightforward!

sure beats hand-editing xml or json anyway :)