Atom feed

2020-12-14

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Well, I've got something that, I think, looks like an atom feed. I would like to say making it went smoothly, but I ran into some issues:

  1. HTML escaping. I want to embed summary snippets in the feed, and it turns out XML doesn't like an un-escaped, semicolon I think it was. I think Hiccup is pretty fantastic, but it does not escape strings by default in the current stable version. That's annoying, but not such a big deal. You can explicitly escape strings, or uses the hiccup2 alpha (which was an easy switch for me so I went and did it).
  2. Previewing the feed locally. Turns out this is.. well, I assume you can do it, but I couldn't figure out how in 20-40 minutes. There are several RSS readers for linux[0]. Some, but not all, will load a local XML file. I can't iterate on fixing things though because my feed gets cached and I can't seems to refresh that caches. Deleting the feed and re-adding it via the GUI doesn't work. I mean, there's got to be a file somewhere I can delete, but sad days.

So anyway. The feed is at ./atom.xml and maybe it'll load for you. It seems to work with the chrome RSS extension.

I wouldn't have guessed messing around with the readers would take longer than extracting my metadata and throwing it into XML, but I shouldn't be surprised. Yay computers.

[0]: Apparently ViennaRSS is a solution for OSX (mentioned [here](http//simianuprising.com/2016/01/27/previewing-localdev-rss-feeds-on-mac-osx)), but I don't have an OSX machine. Presumably I can configure one of these feed readers into working (or maybe akregator can do it (I haven't installed it yet because it pulls in 500mb of stuff I don't particularly want)). For now though, I guess I'll just preview once it's uploaded (Chrome RSS extension doesn't seem to have caching issues, but it won't open local files either).