kylelabriola

Kyle Labriola

@kylelabriola

blogging (ashamedly)

Hello! I'm an artist, writer, and game developer. I work for @7thBeatGames on "A Dance of Fire and Ice" and "Rhythm Doctor."

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I run @IndieGamesofCohost where I share screenshots and spotlights of indie games. I also interview devs here on Cohost.

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kylelabriola
@kylelabriola
MOKKA
@MOKKA
MOKKA
@MOKKA

How the hell do I set up an RSS feed for my blog?

(aka "Web search is fucked and I don't want to yell at my PC anymore).

Hi friends,

RSS feeds are cool, everyone wants one these days. I too want to have one. I mean technically my website was supposed to have one since late 2022, but for some reason it never really worked.
Well, I did get it working just now (I was able to subscribe to it), but I'm still struggling with some things. Mainly I'm interested finding answers for the following two questions:

(First of all, my stuff is hosted on neocities and I use Zonelets to do the blogging stuff. Anyways, questions:)

  1. Right now, I have to manually add every post to the rss script and considering that I'm a simple person with a short attention span, I was wondering if there's a way to automate that process? I already have a directory with every post for the site's archive and such that's being done with javascript and I'm wondering if there's a way to make the rss feed draw from that script's data in some way?

  2. How do I make this feed available for people?

I really hope that folks can help me here, I tried using the internet, but that thing is broken and terrible.

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in reply to @MOKKA's post:

chel
@chel

Candied Reptile has put together a list of RSS tutorials and resources here - since web search is so broken, I found some good resources here for what I'm trying to do! There are tutorials here for manual updates, but also a few for some more automated approaches - not sure if anything here might of help! https://candiedreptile.club/bloglet/posts/2024-09-10-RSS-Resources.html

In terms of making it available - the guide they link in that above resources list by dogmeat, has a few links to tools that let you display the contents of an RSS feed on your site in a widget of sorts - maybe something here would be what you're looking for! https://doqmeat.com/notebook/tutorials/rss/

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ldx
@ldx

I’m also using zonelets with rss for my blog (http://adamledoux.net/blog/index.html) so I’ll take a shot at answering these!

I’ll start with question #2 since that’s the easy one. There are two typical ways to make the feed easy to subscribe to:

  • Add a link to the rss feed in the <head> of pages on your blog. If people have a browser plug-in that tells them when a site has rss, this is where it would look. For example here’s mine: <link href="https://adamledoux.net/blog/feed.xml" rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Updates from A. Le Doux's Blog" />. Note this won’t be visible on the page - it’s just metadata.
  • I also think it’s a good idea to add a regular old visible link to the feed somewhere on your page that people can click on. For zonelets if you want to add one to your site header you’d need to modify script.js.

Question #1 is trickier. There’s not really a way for the rss feed to access data from zonelet’s javascript file. It is possible to go the other way around though and have zonelets script.js read from the rss instead. I recently hacked something together on my own site to do it. I’d like to write up a proper tutorial eventually but in the meantime you are welcome to take a look at my site’s script file (https://adamledoux.net/blog/script.js) where I’ve replaced everything in section 2 (the “posts array” section) in order to do this. Feel free to copy that code if you want as long as you understand it’s a bit hacky (use it at your own risk, etc) haha xD

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