I’ve just finished a sidequest in which I built a bunch of feeds for the site.
An Unexpected Journey
This is absolutely not what I expected to be working on this morning when I sat down at my workstation, but its been the best sort of detour. I’ve been very much channeling Hal from the televison series Malcom in the Middle.
Just like finding that a light bulb had burned out, I had the thought. My links page looks kinda like an RSS feed. And off I went onto my little sidequest.
Quest Log
- My links pages looks a bit like an RSS feed. I’ve had an RSS feed setup for a while now, and it includes my blog posts. Should I be including these as well?
- It doesn’t make sense to mix the two togerther. What if I made a new feed, just for links?
- I already record my quotes in
toml, and transform them to staticjsonduring builds. I could do the same for my links, and have the output be Atomxmlinstead. - My build scripts have gotten a little messy, I should clean them up first.
- Now I’m noticing that some of them are written in
python. If I re-wrote them intypescriptI could execute them with Bun, which I already needed for site builds. That would eliminate a dependency! - Now I can write a new build script based on the updated quotes transformer script.
- It would be trivial to make another feed for my quotes, and my readers might like that. I’ll set that up too.
- Now I’m seeing that I’ve been doing something similar with my changelog already, except it’s just a direct copy of my
gitrepository commit messages. That’s kinda lame, I should be writing these separately. And that could be its own feed! - I need to let people know that these new feeds exist, there’s nothing a reader could see in the browser to indicate that they are there. I should build a dedicated Feeds page, and make sure it shows up in More.
- Phew, that was a lot of work… I should write a post about it.
- I think I’m extremely clever 🤔 and want to use the old Hal meme, I should also update my Zola templates to support video embeds too, so that I can include the clip. It’s getting late, I just realized that the clip isn’t in English. Hopefully no one notices…
Quest Complete
I really enjoyed working on this today, and I think going forward having these additional feeds will be a good thing. As I publish this post, the new feeds page is live. You can find it here.
Have you recently had an interesting side quest of your own? Did you subscribe to any of the new feeds that I made? If so, let me know!
You can reach out through email at mail@lzon.ca, or contact me via my social accounts. All listed on the homepage.