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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 |