RSS feed

So I'm attempting to get an RSS feed working for this website. Since I'm not using a real blog platform or anything similar, that means I'm stuck hand-coding my RSS. Or, technically, that I'm stuck making my own generator for it.

Surprising nobody, I've gone and made a Google spreadsheet thing in an attempt to solve this problem. The idea is that I can just enter some information about my latest post and have it output something that only needs a little hand-editing to make a working rss.xml file. It seems like it works so far, but I guess we'll see!

I know that I ought to do an Atom feed too, but right now that looks like a lot of additional hassle for no identifiable additional benefit. So I'm putting it off for now.

I will take this opportunity to remind folks that free, cross-platform feed readers are still a thing after the lamented death of Google Reader. I'm currently using Feedly, and it gets the job done ("the job" mostly being the aggregation of lots of RPG blogs and a few webcomics into one place). It keeps track of my feeds and activity between desktop and mobile use. I should admit, though, that Feedly exhibits that all-too-familiar pathology of the modern app and web platform: the useless and undesired "AI" features. Seems like it only actually functions on the paid version of the service, and it's as easily ignorable in the free version as "premium" features normally are. Anyway, the thing works fine.

I have considered trying out Thunderbird or FeedReader as an alternative, though.

Oh, I should also mention that I never would have considered hand-coding an RSS file if my good friend Amanda—who builds some really nice websites for her comics projects—hadn't assured me it was possible. Thanks, Amanda!