RSS Feed Generator

A blog on a static site has no WordPress to generate a feed, yet RSS readers, automations and newsletter services still expect one. Here you fill in the channel's title, URL and description, list your posts one per line in the format title, pipe, URL, pipe, description, and copy an RSS 2.0 XML file ready to be saved as feed.xml on your server and published.

Two quirks worth knowing before you publish. First: the pipe character is the field separator, so a title containing one breaks the line, with everything after it spilling into the next field. Second: pubDate for every item is stamped with the date and time of generation. RSS readers sort by that date, so to keep your posts in real chronological order, edit the dates in the XML before uploading. Characters like ampersands and less-than signs are escaped automatically.

Save it as feed.xml or rss.xml, upload it, and announce the address in your pages' head with a link rel=alternate tag of type application/rss+xml, which is how readers auto-discover feeds. Run the result through the W3C feed validator before sharing it. Since the file is static, every new post means regenerating and re-uploading; if you publish often, generate the feed in your site's build step instead. Everything happens in the browser; nothing gets sent anywhere.