The RSS feed on my Astro blog now renders full posts
I’ve started consuming more blogs via RSS feeds recently (Manu’s yearly reminder was a good push) and so fixing my own feed had been on my to-do list for a while.
If you’re not familiar with RSS feeds, they look like this - a bunch of text in an XML file. You can read these feeds in RSS reader apps like NetNewsWire. It’s more chill way to consume content compared to social media feeds where you have to deal with notifications or third-party ads.
My blog’s RSS feed was quite pitiful because the Astro framework I use for this blog didn’t support it out of the box. The feed would only show the first paragraph of each post, and so you’d have to click through to my site to read the rest.
It used to be quite painful to get RSS working with MDX and Astro (looking at some of the older blog posts out there on the topic). But thanks to D’Amato’s blog post I learned the best way to do it now is using Astro’s new experimental Container API. Bruno Monteiro’s post was also useful for his note on images and error handling (thanks!)
I had hopes I could make quick work of this with my recently acquired Claude subscription but even so it was still quite painful. My blog code just has too many edge cases. Some of my images I store locally in my blog’s repository, while others live remotely on Cloudflare (which is also a recent development). And not to mention the 5 separate categories I have for blog posts (I have plans to properly add my map as a 6th one soon).
It’s not quite 100% working, but I think I can describe the current state of my RSS feed as “done for now”. It should at least be working much better than before, with support for images too.
Subscribing to sub-feeds
As part of this update, I decided to show all of my posts in my RSS feed, including all photos, book reviews and notes. Previously I was a bit more intentional with only showing what I felt were “proper” posts on the feed.
If you are reading this post from a RSS reader (hello!) and are finding it to be too spammy, I have also added support for you to be able to subscribe to one or more sub-feeds only, which you can find the links for on my blog here.
If there are still any major bugs you’re noticing with the feed, please leave a comment on this post, or reach out to me on Bluesky.