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My old RSS blog
November 10th, 2021
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In the mid-aughts I moved to Alaska and took on a role which,
among other duties, had me overseeing the development of a massive
documentation project for the state's electronic grant program.
This documentation project needed to provide content in many
formats including PDFs and HTML. I was a big proponent of the web
standards movement at the time and saw an opportunity to build our
content with XML and XSLT.
That led me to getting intimately familiar with transformations
and how to style them for various formats. It was pretty darn cool
and pretty powerful. Of course writing documentation directly in
XML has challenges. So I also wrote schemas for the different
types of documents and set up Oxygen XML Editor with all those
goodies for our copywriters. It worked quite well!
At that same time I was also blogging a lot and thought to myself,
"Hey, RSS is an XML format. I bet I could just write that and
generate my whole blog from it."
So I did.
I manually authored one file, the RSS feed, in vim. I used Oxygen
here and there to validate things and build the XSLTs for the blog
pages, book reviews, and even a commenting system. Later I figured
out how to integrate 3rd party commenting into it and added a tiny
PHP handler to add pagination and links to specific entries. At
the heart, though, was just the RSS and XSLT.
Eventually I moved on from there to some other hot new thing, but
I have always been particularly proud of that. It worked natively
in Internet Explorer at the time and with a tiny helper script in
Opera.
The blog came up in conversation on Mastodon yesterday and on
a whim I looked at the Wayback Machine to see if it was still
around. Sadly the CSS file wasn't cached there, but the blog
itself and the XSLT were! I'll include a link below in case
you want to check out the magic sauce.
What sorts of crazy blogging platforms have you home-grown over
the years? Phlogs and gemlogs are of interest too. I use my
"burrow" utility for gopher. I bet some of you have some pretty
fancy stuff by this point.
rss2html.xsl
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