RSS Feed Up and Running! How I did it.

Finally set up RSS feed so my followers can actually subscribe!

Turns out it’s quite easy to set up an RSS feed with Jekyll. It’s spelled out fairly well here, although it mostly focuses on getting set up with R Blogger. I will be paraphrasizing and focusing on a general RSS feed setup.

[First], set up your Jekyll blog. Add the gem jekyll-feed.

Gemfile

*** abbreviated ***

gem 'jekyll-feed'

*** abbreviated ***

_config.yml

*** abbreviated ***

plugins:
  - jekyll-feed

*** abbreviated ***

[Second] run bundle install to install locally. My local ruby env. is kinda messed up so I skipped this step. Test in prod right?!?

[Third] push to GitHub. Once it is pushed check that all is well by navigating to http://YOUR_PAGE/feed.xml

At first, if you do not have an RSS reader it may say something along the lines of No RSS reader installed.

[Fourth] install an RSS reader if you don’t have one.

As an example, let’s say you downloaded the RSS Feed Reader Chrome extension and navigate to my blog’s RSS feed, you should see something like this:

[Fifth] users should be able to subscribe to email alerts. While you could use the above Chrome extension, I am using FeedRabbit. Not 100% sure how well it works because I believe it emails notifications daily (and I just set this up today), but I imagine it gets the job done.