Hacker News Reader

Comment by medhir | Hacker News Reader

I recently had a popular post on HN and several people reached out asking if I had an RSS feed implemented.

Was surprised that anyone would be interested in keeping up with my writing, but was happy to oblige the request as it had been on my to-do list for a while. Happy I did do as it seems many people are hitting the RSS endpoint now. Cool to see that RSS is relevant in 2025, and will definitely advocate for its usage more moving forward :-)

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I might have been one of these people, because I was following your site as a bookmark in my RSS reader already. I didn't see any content in your feed so I checked again for a feed endpoint. I found it eventually on your site, but you might consider making it auto-discoverable (see https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery). People only have to enter your domain name into their RSS reader then.

Ah nice, thanks for the heads up! I’ll look into adding this soon.

That might be a useful site, but why on earth is it stuffed full of privacy-abusing, invasive advertising? I'm sure there are better sources for the RSS standard.

Oh, really? My bad. I don't see ads over there.

Auto-discovery for RSS is simple enough to explain here: just put the following code in your head element (at least on the homepage).

The Hacker News folks do love their RSS. I also added support for RSS[1] to my site when one of my posts hit the front page, and a few people reached out for an RSS link.

I came to the industry way later than the Web 2.0 inception and didn’t even know about it until a while back.

[1]: https://rednafi.com/index.xml

How long did it take you to implement?

I never bothered to make a list of the mails I send but now I see it is quite useful to show how well it works. Maybe some data on implementation time would be as useful.

Took me a few hours. I use MDX for formatting so most of the time was spent figuring out how to convert the MDX to plain HTML. Not a very heavy lift overall :)

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