RSS feeds for your org-mode website

Summary: I present the `org-publish-rss.el` package for Emacs that helps you create RSS feeds for org-mode-based websites.

RSS feeds are pretty great. I'm not going to make a case for them, since I think this is a common opinion in hackers' circles (which you most probably belong to if you're reading me). I build and publish my personal website using org-mode's very good publishing functions, which have no built-in way of generating RSS feeds. There is however the ox-rss exporter that works, but it assumes that every entry is a headline in one monolithic org file. A more common pattern for blog websites however, is to represent each post using a different file.

Enters the recent org-publish-rss.el package by Thomas Ingram that adheres to the one file per entry concept. It does the job wonderfully in a "setup once and forget" way. You can refer to the project's good Readme file or to the comments in the .el file itself to get started.

As a cool feature, I'll mention the :rss-filter-function property that you can use to omit some files from your RSS feed. In my case I use it to skip draft posts or the posts that are translations of an original English post. I set it up to the same function that filters the posts landing in the list on my homepage.

In the case you already have an org-mode website, you can hopefully use this package as a low friction way of setting up RSS feeds.

Thanks to Thomas for the nice package and for letting me help here and there with it, it's great fun.

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