RSS Manufaktur

A template to build RSS Feeds.

In short, RSS Manufaktur takes information of a blog and transforms it into a custom RSS feed for your enjoyment.

Get started

To make this to your own Manufaktur you can either:

• Use the «Use this template» button on the top of the page
• Fork this repository

Note: When you use the template button, you lose access to the commit history and (potential) future features.

Afterwards you can update the JSON file in ./_src/_data and add the sites you want to scrape.

As working with CSS selectors is a bit daunting, we’re open for better ideas.

How it works

Add blog data in _src/_data/blog-info.json. You can add as many blogs as you like.

The data should look as follows:

[
  {
    "name": "ovl.design",
    "parserInfo": {
      "url": "https://www.ovl.design/text/",
      "elements": {
        "posts": "article.article-card",
        "postTitle": ".article-card__headline",
        "postURL": ".article-card__link",
        "postDate": ".article-card__date > time",
        "postIntro": ".article-card__date + p"
      }
    }
  }
]

parserInfo will be passed to Blog Parser, our friendly little utility to make sense of a blog. See those docs for further info.

The URL given in parserInfo.url will be scraped and all posts returned. Based on this data, RSS Manufaktur will build a RSS feed.

All created feeds are shown on the homepage.

Caching

Fetched posts are preserved to disc in a distinct cache per site. This allows you to build up a feed over time, as @inframanufaktur/blog-parser only fetches the first page of a blog.

You can either have this cache in your version control, or .gitignore this, and use a build plugin like netlify-plugin-cache to preserve it between builds.

The cache folder is ./posts.

The cache name is automatically generated based on parserInfo.url, replacing www. and adding the hashed URL pathname. This allows to have multiple feeds from the same host (e.g. for following multiple categories or authors which do not have their own feeds).

Rebuilding Feeds

The generated site itself is static. To update the feeds you’ll need to trigger a rebuild at certain intervals (e.g. every night).

On most hosting providers you’ll be able to do so via CRON jobs. Netlify provided a guide for scheduled deploys on their blog. The same concept can be adapted for DigitalOcean functions or your own server.

Existing Feeds

As @inframanufaktur/blog-parser collects existing feeds from the blog page, we can use this information to show them when building. Please use first party feeds whenever possible. They are most likely better.

What it needs

Create a .env file with the following content:

BASE_URL=https://www.yourdomain.dev

We need to have a base URL to construct a public link to your feed.