We're excited to announce a new way for you to stay up to date with our latest content—through our brand-new RSS feed (link). While we've been focusing on LinkedIn to share our articles on software engineering and product development, we realized we were missing a key opportunity to engage with our most committed followers. Thanks to an insightful nudge from Mike Zornek, we've added an RSS feed to our site to make sure you never miss a post.
Admittedly, I hadn't given RSS much thought before. I'm someone who usually consumes news and professional content via podcasts. But once I explored RSS further, I was pleasantly surprised by how convenient and efficient it is to stay up to date with my favorite content. In particular, I'd recommend checking out Fiery Feeds or Inoreader if you're looking for a good feed reader to setup on your phone and/or computer. And be sure to subscribe to our feed here.
What is RSS?
Before we dive into the details of how we set up our RSS feed, let's take a step back and look at what RSS actually is and why it's worth considering.
RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a standardized format for delivering content such as articles, podcasts, and videos. Built on XML, it allows users to subscribe to a feed, automatically pulling updates into an RSS reader without having to visit the website or subscribe to a newsletter. While it's been around for over 25 years, its popularity has risen and fallen a few times, showing signs of resurgence over the past few years.
RSS is a powerful tool for anyone regularly publishing content and if our experience is any indication, getting a feed up and run can be quite easy to do.
Setting up an RSS Feed
Our site is built using Eleventy, a JavaScript-based static site generator. The Eleventy community has developed a number of plugins that can be added to a site via NPM packages, enabling various types functionality and features. The Eleventy RSS plugin provides support for configuring and publishing an RSS feed for the content available on a site. Each time an update is deployed to the site a new version of the feed is generated and made available at the specified path (e.g. /feed.xml).
At the time, our site was running a rather old version of Eleventy, version 2.0.1 to be exact. To use the latest version of this plugin we would need to upgrade to version 3.0.0. So, we braced ourselves for the usual headaches that come with major version upgrades, but to our surprise, the process went off without a hitch. After following the step-by-step upgrade instructions and resolving a few deprecation warnings, the site was back up and running in under 45 minutes! It was one of those rare moments in development where everything just... worked.
With the upgrade completed we were able to use the latest version of the Eleventy RSS plugin and leverage all of its bells and whistles in configuring our RSS feed. Initially we tried using the out-of-the-box RSS feed template, which required just a few lines of code in our site configuration file to get set up. While this provided a reasonable starting point for our feed, it was lacking in a few key areas. Since we have three separate authors publishing content on our site, we wanted to assign the author for each individual item in the feed based on the author of the corresponding post. We also wanted more control of the number of posts included in the feed and their ordering. To accomplish this, we configured a custom template for the feed using the Nunjucks templating language to generate an RSS compatible XML file. This gave us the best of both worlds. We are still able to use the helpful utilities and feed generation process provided by the RSS plugin but now we have full control over the content generated within the RSS feed file.
Overall with a few hours of work, we were able to establish a valuable new channel for distributing the articles we publish each week.
There are Always Tradeoffs
As with most any technology, RSS is a tool that has both pros and cons. It's far from perfect, but can be very valuable when used in the right circumstances. As we considered leveraging it to publish posts on this site, the following are some of the tradeoffs that stood out to us.
- Simple Setup: It's easy to get setup and requires almost no overhead to maintain.
- Promotes Privacy: It provides nearly complete privacy for subscribers, allowing them to sign up without providing any information.
- End-User Control: It gives subscribers full control over their subscription and when they choose to pull and read our posts.
- Limited Tracking: It offers limited, if any, means of tracking our subscribers to understand who they are, why they subscribing, or when they unsubscribe.
- No Subscriber Portability: It provides limited means of engaging with subscribers outside of the feed or migrating them over to other marketing channels.
- Misuse of Content: It makes it relatively easy for someone to scrape or repurpose your content without proper attribution.
For us, the ability to easily share content while respecting subscriber privacy far outweighed the drawbacks, but it's essential to evaluate these tradeoffs on a case-by-case basis, in light of on your goals and audience. If you’re a developer or run your own blog, portfolio, or content-heavy site, adding an RSS feed can be a quick win. It’s a low-effort way to engage your audience and extend your content’s reach. We encourage you to consider it and give it a try!
Thanks so much for reading. If you have additional thoughts we'd love to hear from you. How do you stay on top of the latest news and content in your field? Have you used RSS before, or do you rely on other tools? Drop us a comment below or reach out at hello@gobetweenlab.com.