Creating an RSS Feed
Jan 07, 2025 00:00

I struggled with ox-rss for my blog feed and really could never get it working. It would generate an RSS file, but for some reason, the feed readers wouldn’t get anything. I don’t know enough about XML to fix it, and I had neither the time right now nor the inclination to learn.

So, I stumbled across Emacs Webfeeder, which creates a feed from the HTML files. After adding it with use-package, I removed the RSS component of my publish.el file, and changed by blog build function to this: 

(defun orgblog-build ()
  (interactive)
  (progn
    (find-file "~/sites/orgblog/publish.el")
    (eval-buffer)
    (org-publish-all)
    (webfeeder-build "atom.xml"
                       "./docs"
                       "https://randyridenour.net/"
                       (let ((default-directory (expand-file-name "./docs")))
                         (remove "posts/index.html"
                                 (directory-files-recursively "posts"
                                                              ".*\\.html$")))
                       :title "Randy Ridenour"
                       :description "Blog posts by Randy Ridenour")
    (kill-buffer))
  (message "Build complete!"))

After building the site, Webfeeder generated an atom.rss file, and everything works fine. That was the last critical component of my endeavor to blog with Emacs only.

Tagged: Blog Emacs