Supporting single-item RSS

This blog now generates single-item RSS alongside each blog post.

This is in preparation for how I mean to support blog-to-blog comments, most directly.

But in general it is offered as an alternative to approaches like microformats.

Microformats exist and other people use them. I feel a bit bad not to adopt them. But my preference is to have meta-data more cleanly separated from displayed HTML, even if it is "POSH". It seems to me like too many concerns are mixed.

If microformats were very widely adopted — particularly if the JVM ecosystem already had well-supported, widely used microformats parsers — I might swallow my own preference and run with them. But I don't think that's the case. I'm going to have to do my own parsing, and I have good tools for that with XML and RSS.

unstatic SimpleBlog instances now support generating single-item RSS. Just override

val generateSingleItemRss : Boolean

to true, and they will appear.

By default, each entry's single-item RSS is placed by converting each whatever.html to whatever.rss, under the same path. (If the leaf of the path does not end with .html, then .rss is simply appended to the full path.)

If you prefer a different scheme, you can override

def singleItemRssSiteRootedFromPermalinkSiteRooted( permalinkSiteRooted : Rooted ) : Rooted

where Rooted is a unstantic.UrlPath.Rooted.

Single-item RSS and the HTML "permalink" for the item should mutually refer to one another.

In the HTML header tag, we add a <link> tag with rel="alternate" to point to the single-item RSS.

We don't want feed readers to subscribe to single-item RSS, so, a bit clumsily, we make up a special content type that feed readers won't recognize, application/x-single-item-rss+xml.

Here's the link you'll find in the source of this post.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/x-single-item-rss+xml" title="Supporting single-item RSS" href="index.rss">

The single-item RSS links back to the HTML as a matter of course, via the standard <link> element within the sole <item>.

Check out the single-item RSS for this post!

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