Jekyll Might Have Failed Me?

May 22, 2024

I use tags in Bear to save links and quick notes for reference. A few of them are ideas for work-related things or future project ideas, but most are just cool things I want to keep track of. I’ve been thinking for a while: why keep those locked in Bear? I really like how many other sites, Kottke.org being a great example, share short content.

I’m still waffling about how/if I want to set this up, but I decided to at least test how this could work. I was able to easily set up the collection in Jekyll, and played with a quick layout for it. I then looked at how RSS/Atom feeds work. I was thinking that I might want to have multiple feeds. Maybe not everyone wants quick posts, for example. If I did set this up, I’d also want an “everything” feed and long-posts-only feed. I like how this is done on Daring Fireball.

Turns out, that doesn’t seem possible. The jekyll-feed plugin that’s provided by GitHub Pages creates a single feed file for each content type. There’s no way to combine them via the plugin, and I’d prefer not to do this myself. I’m a big fan of using libraries to generate XML in general. There’s a lot that that go wrong when creating XML with templates. ¹ Sadly, that seems to be what the current plugin is doing. I’d also prefer to use an RSS/Atom library, as I’m certain there’s a lot that can go wrong there as well.

I’m not even sure this is something I want to do. I’m also not sure I should care that much about how my feed is generated. But hitting this one roadblock is also making me rethink sticking with Jekyll. Even if the issue with jekyll-feed is fixed, it’s unclear if it would work with the older version of Jekyll used by GitHub Pages. I plan on looking into how this might work with Hugo and 11ty next.

The 3rd edition of XML in a Nutshell has 689 pages! I sadly owned the 2nd edition of this, and it was well used. Good book, bad topic. ↩