Added support for RSS 2.0!

You can now easily subscribe to updates to this blog via RSS

Written by: Kevin Grahl | Published: Mon, September 16th 2019 » 1min - 281 words

There are many things on my to-do list for this website but today I finally got to creating a RSS 2.0 feed so that interested readers can subscribe to updates with their favorite feed reader. It's in the top right corner in case you have not spotted it yet. I spent some time freshing up on the state of RSS feeds, it's been a while since I last maintained one myself, and I hope everything works like it should. I decided to start with a RSS 2.0 feed for now simply because it was the easiest for me to do quickly but later on I plan to include either an atom feed or a json feed in addition. Not quite sure which one I'm going for but I'm open for suggestions!

I wasn't sure wether to include the full text for every article within the rss.xml but eventually decided to only include the first or so paragraph just like I do on the page /txt where you can browse my published articles/posts. The reason behind my decision was mainly that I want my readers to have a nice expierience while reading. My articles may include (interactive) content that can't be displayed when consuming through RSS only. This way my readers can subscribe to get notified when a new post is available and the description should have enough information to decide if they should click through to read the whole post. My website is very leightweight and should load very fast (under 100ms in Germany) even on mobile connections so I don't think this is a big inconvenience. As always; Let me know should you feel otherwise, I'm always open for constructive feedback!

  1. RSS is a Web content syndication format. Its name is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication. RSS is a dialect of XML. All RSS files must conform to the XML 1.0 specification, as published on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) website. You can read the specs for RSS 2.0 here. ↩︎
  2. Atom is a way to read and write information on the web, and is considered a competitor/alternate format to RSS. Atom was developed to avoid the limitations and flaws of RSS. Though Atom is more robust than RSS, the latter still remains a widely used standard. You can read more about RSS vs Atom here. ↩︎
  3. A json feed has the advantage of being easier to programm for. Json feeds can be handled directly by JavaScript for example. Browsers can consume large amount of JSON much more efficiently than they can consume large amount of XML and the gap is widening because the latest versions of the browsers are now providing native, safe support for encoding and decoding JSON. ↩︎