Today, I wanted to mess around with building my own RSS feed, something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. I stumbled upon this thing called “renegade-rss” and figured, why not give it a shot?
Getting Started
First things first, I needed to actually find this “renegade-rss” thing. A quick search, and I found some instructions. I’m not gonna lie, it looked a little intimidating at first, with all this talk of config files and whatnot. But, hey, I’m stubborn, so I pushed on.
I downloaded the necessary files – seemed straightforward enough. There was a sample config file, which I copied and renamed to something like “*”. Gotta start somewhere, right?
Fiddling with the Config
This is where things got a bit hairy. I opened up the config file in a text editor, and… wow. Lots of options. I spent a good chunk of time just reading through it, trying to understand what each setting did. Honestly, half of it was probably stuff I didn’t even need, but I wanted to at least have a basic grasp.
I changed a few things, like the feed title and description – made it all about my blog, obviously. I also added in the URL of my blog’s main page. That seemed important.
The Scary Part: Sources
Now, the real challenge: figuring out how to tell “renegade-rss” where to find my blog posts. This involved something called “sources,” and it was a mix of confusing and… strangely satisfying.
I found the instructions for setting up sources. I’m pretty sure It looks like it involved using some sort of selectors. I went to some website with my own page and did a quick inspect element of the source, and copied the elements, and went back to the configuration to paste them.
I tested my settings, and got several errors, and did some research and found some other commands to use, and I replaced the old ones and retested. This time, I see some positive output.
Generating the Feed
With my config file all set up (or so I hoped), it was time to actually generate the RSS feed. I ran the command, and there are some errors again, but I read carefully. Then I went back to my setting, and modified them, and finally, rerun it. I see a “*” file show up in the folder. That felt like a victory!
Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3
Of course, I had to make sure this thing actually worked. I opened up the “*” file, and it looked… like a bunch of code. I copied the content and pasted into a RSS validator to see if I screwed up. After fixing several bugs, I finally got a “Congratulations” from the validator.
Final Thoughts
Okay, so it wasn’t exactly a smooth process. There was definitely some trial and error involved, a few moments of “what the heck am I doing?”, and maybe a little bit of cursing at my computer. But, I did it! I have a working (I think) RSS feed, generated by “renegade-rss”.
Would I recommend this to a complete beginner? Maybe not. It’s definitely got a learning curve. But if you’re comfortable poking around in config files and don’t mind a bit of a challenge, it’s a pretty cool way to build your own RSS feed. I feel kinda proud of myself, to be honest. Now, I can go learn how I can put this link on my page to let people subscribe!