dinosaurs eat everybody

Since the death of Google Reader I feel like I’ve seen people use RSS less and less, but a quick informal survey of friends showed that some people still use it for some things so maybe this blog should have a feed, right?.

I was interested in how hard it would be to add RSS to this weird Jekyll/Sinatra hybrid I have running and had a few minutes tonight so I decided to give it a shot. It turned out to not be bad. I just followed this quick tutoral and found a nice template here and 90% of the work was done (basically I just add another template to my Jekyll project and a few lines in my config and an xml file gets generated along with everything else when I run jekyll build.

The only custom part was adding a few lines to my Jekyll handler method in my main Sinatra app to suppress the layout template and render the RSS file as XML:

if file_path.include? "rss.xml"
  content_type 'text/xml'
  erb contents, :layout => false
else 
  erb contents
end

Now you can subscribe to this blog via RSS is you so desire!