My website now supports feed readers!

Feed reading is an old school way to follow websites and blogs on the internet. It's frankly kinda died out on the internet because it was waaaayyy to good for people and not for business. However, it's not too late to start feed reading and get some value out of it.

As someone coming back to the world of feeds after at least a decade, I am using Feedly for my feed reading and it's been pretty good so far.

Feed reading is great

Feed reading is really simple. Instead of you checking X different websites everyday, you collect the websites' feeds together in a feed reader. It goes out and grabs all the new content if there is any for you. It saves a ton of time and makes sure you don't miss anything.

Feed readers are great because they put you in control of what you see. You get to curate the feeds you want to read and it's always easy to stay up to date. (It's also generally advertising- and tracking-free if you're using a feed reader service, hence why businesses struggle to see the value in offering feeds.)

I hope providing my website readers a feed makes for a better user experience, or at least a new option for getting updates that's more reliable than checking every once in awhile.

Feed writing could be better

Implementing a feed for this website was pretty easy. I used the NodeJS feed package to generate the feed in Atom format. When I publish a new article, a new entry in the feed is also added. The feed will always stay in sync.

I can't say I am happy with the feed package. I basically had to wrap the whole thing with a better API to have it up to my standards and even then it generates less than pleasant output as I didn't go so far as to reverse engineer it completely. The code basically explains nothing about itself or why decisions are made the way they are.

Anyhoo, I can't talk and not walk so I am publishing my wrapper version to @andrejewski/atom-feed-generator to make the next person's feed writing experience a bit better! Feed reading ought to live on after all.

Thanks to Jake for suggesting I add feed reader support and providing bug reports as I stumbled through achieving decent reader compatibility.