# RSS/Atom feeds; what are they and why you should care

_Published: February 9, 2021_

I've always wanted this site to be an homage to tech that I enjoy
using, and recently, that's included old-school RSS/Atom feeds.
However, up until now, I had only been a feed consumer and had
never produced my own.  So, this past weekend I decided to hunker
down and read enough of the spec to generate one for this site.

But let's back up -- what is a feed? Why should you care?

A feed is simply a standardized listing of items a source (blog,
vlog, newspaper, etc) has generated recently.  Users then consume
multiple feeds to get centralized notifications on new content.
Think "following" on social media, but generalized for any content
accessible on the web.

The most important feature of a feed is that it has been
standardized and is not controlled by any individual corporation.
This ensures that users are not only free from vendor lock-in, but
it also allows for an increasingly diverse set of clients and
sources.

For example, there are clients ranging from FOSS text only terminal
clients like [`newsboat(1)`](https://newsboat.org) to commercial apps
like [Feedly](https://feedly.com). And despite being drastically
different UI's, their purpose is the same: allow you to subscribe
to any number of feeds, and centralize your notifications.

The idea is simple, but it's transformed the way I interact with
the web.  It saves me time in not browsing the infinite scroll that
has become social media, and it allows me to stay up to date with
smaller blogs that don't post frequently (cough, like yours truly,
cough).

Consider a new blog post on this site.  Without a feed, you'd have
to periodically check my `blog(7)` for updates or hear about it
through some other link aggregation or social media site
(Hackernews, Reddit, etc).  Adding a feed allows those who want to
follow to get notifications, without checking other locations or
having to waste time checking back periodically.

So if you haven't tried a feed reader ever, go find one that suits
your fancy and give it a try!  In an era where user upvoted content
reigns king (Reddit, Facebook, etc), it's really empowering as a
user to decide what you see updates for and to be able to check
them on your own time.  And if you're a publisher of any content,
consider creating a feed for others to follow.  I'll certainly
appreciate it!

It's never too late to take control of your digital habits, and
using a feed reader is a good place to start.

## Implementation

If you read this far, I thought you might also be interested in
hearing not only the what and the why but also the how.

Due to the recent migration to using `mdoc(7)` as the markup for this
site (detailed in [my-old-man(7)](/blog/my-old-man.html)), I knew that
finding an off-the-shelf feed generator would be unlikely.
Plus, with my general desire to keep the site build-able by base
OpenBSD, I figured it was as good an excuse as any to read the
spec and generate it myself.

I ended up choosing Atom over RSS mostly based on some online
opinions that it is a stricter standard, but I can't say much to
back that up.  What I can say is that after the initial confusion
of how to escape the embedded HTML in the XML feed, it was pretty
smooth sailing.

The full implementation is in
[genatom.sh](https://git.sr.ht/~akarle/alexkarle.com/tree/5c1fd5edca840e3ec2f8a80b8fed763d30cfa11a/item/bin/genatom.sh)
and basically boils down to:

1. `grep(1)` call through the blog.7 file to get a list of entries
  and their dates
2. Print the header of the XML (with newest date from 1.)
3. For each item in entries, add the XML entry along with the
  content as generated by `mandoc(1)` with the `-O` fragment option.
  This ensures the "notification" has the full post -- users
  never even need to visit the site!
4. End by printing the footer of the XML

And that's it!  The only real trick was to use
[CDATA sections](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDATA) around the entry
content in the XML to escape the HTML tags.

And of course, like everything else in this blog, it rebuilds on
`git-push` via a call to `make(1)`.

## See Also

- [My Atom feed](https://alexkarle.com/atom.xml)
- [Wiki page on Atom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(Web_standard%29)
- [Atom RFC](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4287)
- [Related advocacy](https://atthis.link/blog/2021/rss.html)

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