I've added an RSS feed output to my static site generator scripts (written in bash). The feed file is now available at feed.xml.
It was pretty quick and easy to output the XML for the feed. I wanted to include both blog articles and birds galleries in the feed, so I write out both of those to XML files (containing just a series of <item>
elements) in their respective bash scripts. The final step was reading the <item>
elements and sorting them based on their <pubDate>
(NetNewsWire didn't sort the items based on date, as I assumed it would).
One aspect of RSS that I haven't wrapped my head around is whether to include the full article body in the RSS feed. I appreciate that RSS readers might help put more eyeballs on my content (at least, in the past, when they were more widely used) but I'd like readers to see my site's header and footer so that they might browse around some after reading an article. I don't see anyone else including a header/footer within an RSS article, and that seems garish and tacky to me. Monetization isn't an issue for my site, for now, but I wonder how sites that monetize with ads feel about RSS.
Another issue is formatting. For blog posts this isn't a big deal, since I believe RSS readers will generally do a good job, but for my birds galleries I'd like readers to see the images with their associated timestamp, species notes, and comments formatted exactly as intended.
Since I already have an "above the fold" mechanism in place for including just the opening section of blog articles on the main blog pages, I use that to publish just that opening portion of each blog article to the RSS feed, followed by a link to read the rest of the article on the site. For birds gallery feed items, I select the "best" image from each gallery and include just that one image in the feed (again, then followed by a link to see the rest of the gallery on the site).