Rylie Blogs Rarely ／ blog.ryliejamesthomas.net

I’ve been using a proper RSS reader instead of Firefox’s menu-based stuff. Because of that I’m now using RSS to read whole articles instead of just going to whatever pages, and today noticed that the RSS feeds I’ve been hand-writing from my own sites could be more useful: at the moment they’re just giving a short summary, instead of the whole post.

So I’ve been learning a bit more about RSS syntax, and wanted to update the previous post I made.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<rss version="2.0">
	<channel>
		<title></title>
		<link></link>
		<description></description>
		<item>
			<title></title>
			<link></link>
			<description>
				<![CDATA[]]>
			</description>
		</item>
	</channel>
</rss>

Notes:

• First thing I fixed is actually putting the text encoding (whoops!).
• I haven’t included them, but there are some useful elements for dates.
• Seems like the best way to add full articles (as well as videos and things) is by wrapping HTML within <![CDATA[]]>. Feels a bit hacky, and maybe Atom handles this stuff more elegantly, but the output is nice.

I finally sat down and spent 20 minutes researching making RSS feeds. They’re super simple, just a little XML:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="2.0">
	<channel>
		<title></title>
		<description></description>
		<link></link>
		<item>
			<title></title>
			<description></description>
			<link></link>
		</item>
	</channel>
</rss>

So you make a new item set for each update. You can have multiple channels per file for things like blog posts and blog comments. You can also link multiple RSS files in the head of the HTML to a similar purpose.

So now ryliejamesthomas.net, blueberrysoft.ryliejamesthomas.net and blueberrysoft.ryliejamesthomas.net/web-log all have RSS feeds.

Also I remembered that I had Google Analytics code on a bunch of websites so I cancelled that gross shit.