Subscribe to my RSS feed (and how I implemented it)

Subscribe to my RSS feed (and how I implemented it)

Did you know that you can easily send me feedback, by hitting 'Send feedback' in the footer? Anyway, I received feedback for the first time a couple of hours ago. It simply stated:

Your blog seems to be lacking a RSS feed.

I enjoy to learn new things, and improve my website further. So I immediately implemented a RSS Feed. 🤓 You can now subscribe to it, and be updated of new articles: https://tonnygaric.com/blog/feed

If you are curious how I implemented it, read further. Note that I use Kirby as CMS, so the information below only applies for Kirby-flavoured websites.

How to add a RSS feed to your Kirby website

1) Add an invisible feed page

We want our feed to be available at https://tonnygaric.com/blog/feed, but we do not want it to appear in any menu, or sitemap. So we will keep it invisible.

Note: If a page is visible, Kirby prefixes the folder name with a number. Thus by not adding a number, the page will be invisible, but accessible.

We create a folder called feed in content/2-blog/.

Inside the feed folder, we create a file called blogfeed.txt,

In our blogfeed.txt we can add some basic information, for example:

Title: Tonny Garić's Blog
\----
Description: The latest updates from Tonny Garić's blog
\----

Note: I had to escape the ----, you must not include the \ from the above example.

2) Download and add the feed plugin

Download the feed plugin from GitHub. It is a simple wrapper to make the feed generation easier.

We create a folder called feed in site/plugins/, and place the files of the feed plugin inside feed.

3) Create a template

Inside our feed/blog folder, we created blogfeed.txt. Inside site/templates we will now create a file named blogfeed.php. By providing this template we make sure that this template will be used instead of the default.php template when we open https://tonnygaric.com/blog/feed.

We now need to get the right set of items for our feed, by placing the following in blogfeed.php:

<?php
// Find blog page, fetch all visible children (articles), flip them to get the
// latest first, limit it to the 10 last articles and call the feed method.
// The feed method is being created by the feed plugin.
echo page('blog')->children()->visible()->flip()->limit(10)->feed(array(
    'title'       => $page->title(),
    'description' => $page->description(),
    'link'        => 'blog',
));
?>

4) Link our feed

We can now visit our feed at https://tonnygaric.com/blog/feed. Now, we can add links to it:

Anchor

<a href="<?= url('blog/feed') ?>">
    Subscribe to our RSS feed
</a>

Link

We can also add the feed to the header of our website—so browsers and feed readers can automatically detect it.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="<?= url('blog/feed') ?>" title="<?= html($pages->find('blog/feed')->title()) ?>"/>

That is it! We are done. ✅

Also see

Also see Kirbys cookbook about RSS-Feeds.

PS

I do not know who send me the feedback, but thank you. I appreciate it.

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