Blog Post

Lover's tree! Lover's tree! I have crafted an RSS feed for the first time! It was a pain in the ass, but I'm glad I learned how to do it.

This page was indispensable, but it doesn't have every part of what I learned, so I'll write my own tutorial below. Specifically, I used this with the Zonelets system, but it should work fine for most static sites.

First, make an .xml file. I just titled mine feed.xml and put it in the same directory as my blog.

Copy and paste the following into your xml file.


            <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
            <rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
            <channel>
            </channel>
            </rss>

Between the tags, we are going to do two things. First, we have to detail what our blog actually is.


            <title>Title of your blog</title>
            <description>Description of your blog</description>
            <link>URL of blog</link>
            <atom:link href="URL of blog/feed.xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />

Change the stuff in the tags to be what it's supposed to be.

Now, we are going to add a bunch of "items". Each item = a post in your blog. Copy and paste this template for each post:


            <item>
                <title>Title of post</title>
                <link>link goes here</link>
                <guid>link goes here again</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 1 Jan 2023 00:00:00 EST</pubDate>
                <description><![CDATA[html of your post goes here]]></description>
            </item>

Change the stuff in the tags to be what it's supposed to be. Keep to the structure as closely as possible, ESPECIALLY in the pubDate section. If you want to make sure your RSS feed works correctly, copy and paste the whole thing into the W3C Feed Validator and see if it gives you the OK.

Here is a (very condensed) version of what my RSS feed looks like, for comparison. Sorry this is so ugly; I can't get the indents working for some reason.


            <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
            <rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
            
            <channel>
                <title>moonblog</title>
                <description>Please enjoy.</description>
                <link>http://moon-hotel.neocities.org/blog</link>
                <atom:link href="http://moon-hotel.neocities.org/blog/feed.xml"
                 rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
            
                <item>
                <title>Hello World</title>
                <link>https://moon-hotel.neocities.org/blog/posts/2023-06-24-Hello-World.html</link>
                <guid>https://moon-hotel.neocities.org/blog/posts/2023-06-24-Hello-World.html</guid> 
                <pubDate>Sat, 24 Jun 2023 19:07:25 EST</pubDate>
                <description><![CDATA[<p>Hey, testing out <a href="http://zonelets.net">Zonelets</a> as a new blog engine. Hopefully it'll be easier--well, not easier, but more full-featured--than the way I was doing it? I really just wanted a way to do a blog on Neocities while also supporting stuff like Commento, so we'll see if that works.</p>]]></description>
                </item>
            
            </channel>
            </rss>