Convert Markdown files to RSS feed | Hacker News Reader

Convert Markdown files to RSS feed

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76 pointsRush211228 comments

I assume this is just a bunch of markdown files you want to convert to RSS? I'm struggling to think of why you would want an RSS feed for a bunch of markdown files that were not part of a blog already? Svekyll (my svelte derivative of Jekyll) generates RSS as well. It isn't that simple, there are lots of validations that can break readers; this has taken quite a few bug fixes to get right:

https://extrastatic.dev/svekyll/svekyll-cli/-/merge_requests...

FWIW: I wrote a post using Svekyll about AI embeddings which has a view source button at the bottom. If you click that, you can download a full svekyll blog and add the RSS code to the _config.yml and then just "npm i && npm run build" to see it generate the RSS for that complex post. Then, look at it in your feed reader to see how it escapes the HTML, code blocks, images, etc.

https://webiphany.com/2024-04-29-distance-sean-shawn

I can answer that first question: For my personal website I wanted to add some updates for different things. But making an entire webpage seemed a bit much and inconvenient for those that wanted keep up to date. So this solution is just less effort (if you subtract the time taken to create an application for it ;))

oh nice! do you support podcasts? (mp3 enclosures on RSS)

No, but let's chat about it! I'll email you.

It suppports links already. So it’s not a lot of effort to add this. Good idea will look into it!

Today I added support for RSS enclosures. So you have full support for podcasts/audio formats.

The "Why RSS" doesn't mention why instead of RFC4287 Atom.

It was first and thus more broadly supported?

RSS came out in 1999, Atom in 2005. There's not a meaningful difference in support between the two at this point.

But RSS gained wide acceptance in that early period. Atom came along later and never seemed to gain as much usage.

People still think of "RSS feeds" and "RSS readers" even if some of those are Atom or at least offer Atom as an option.

It could still be true that more people publish RSS than Atom. But functionally 100% of readers have supported both for a long, long time now.

100% includes iTunes or Podcatchers in general where I hardly find documentation for but would be interested for (my) https://mro.name/radio-privatkopie/

Can you give me a pointer how to write the Atom podcast feed?

Podcasting is kind of a special case, since Apple's guidelines mandate the use of RSS [1]. So if you're publishing a podcast and you want to get into the Apple Podcasts directory, you have to publish a RSS 2.0 feed (as well as meet all their other extra requirements).

If you don't care about the Apple Podcasts directory you can publish an Atom podcast feed that will work with most podcatchers. The primary thing you do differently from a normal Atom feed is to use the `link` element with `rel=enclosure` to reference the audio file for each episode/entry.

    <link rel="enclosure" href="http://example.com/audio.m4a" length="100" type="audio/mp4" />

I wrote Splitflap, the valid RSS/Atom feed generator package for Racket [2]. Not many folks use Racket but you might find the docs a good resource on this sort of thing anyway.

[1]: https://podcasters.apple.com/support/823-podcast-requirement...

[2]: https://docs.racket-lang.org/splitflap/index.html

I have some like this http://rec.mro.name/podcasts/zuendfunk/broadcasts.atom (and .rss, too) which plays the audio nicely e.g. in https://miniflux.app but I remember having trouble with iTunes on MacOS and the Apple podcast iOS app.

But his is mostly try-and-error and merely no specs. Apple doesn't talk about atom AFAIK.

Racket is interesting, I'm into Ocaml, but create those feeds via https://codeberg.org/mro/internet-radio-recorder/src/branch/...

Hey thanks for your comment. Today I actually added support for this. If you make a markdown link to an audio file it will create an RSS enclosure. Including the file length (if it can be retrieved from header information).

[audio/mpeg](http://example.mp3)

Name recognition mostly, but you can just call an Atom feed an RSS feed and no one goes to jail for it, so just use the name that gets the results you care about.

Hi thanks for this comment. I'll look into Atom a bit more for this tool. Heard a lot about it.

I do something similar to my blog, I even wrote an article about it (that is out-of-date, but the idea is the same): https://kokada.capivaras.dev/blog/using-github-as-a-bad-blog....

Basically I write the posts in Markdown, commit them to the repository and it automatically generates a RSS feed and a index in the repository (inside the README.md file), and also publishes the blog posts to https://kokada.capivaras.dev/, that is where the blog actually lives.

> As a result, you don't have to write articles on your website first and have them be read by an RSS reader.

I don't see how this is a problem, for proper preview, the markdown will have to get compiled into HTML/text anyway.

Most SSG's do this, but this can also be done with a good enough markdown compiler (cough lowdown) and a for loop. Without restricting your markdown formatting to a subset of the features of 2 markdown compilers

I've got a WIP markdown to blog project Im working on. I just want to dump MD in a folder and have it create a static site. Could I use this project to generate an RSS and have that added to the final static folder?

Yes! This is exactly what it's meant for.

Very nice and simple idea!

One question: how are the articles linked in the RSS file? Are they relative to that file and/or assumed to be in the same folder?

From reading the code it seems that all articles permalink to a link configuration value which I take it is handled outside of this tool

I hope I understand the question correctly. The markdown files are assumed to be in the same folder. The RSS file can be wherever. This is all handled using a configuration file.

Very cool. Big ups for RSS.

Does not currently support ordered or unordered lists.

The only difference between a rendered and a non rendered list is automatic indentation. It is not a big deal considering markdown was made to be comfortably readable as is. As long as links and images are rendered and you keep your formatting simple without fancy stuff from various markdown extensions, it should be ok for anyone.

It still says this in the README yes. But unordered lists should work. I'm still adding things. My view of RSS is somewhat biased because I use newsboat as my RSS reader, which is text only. Feel free to share ideas!

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