Since I personally consume most of the blogs I read via RSS (since the loss of Google Reader, I switched to hosting my own Tiny Tiny RSS instance and am quite happy), having an RSS feed available has always been on the roadmap.  But after I started making "we should blog more" challenge noises at Josh, he pushed me to get RSS up immediately, as he consumes all his blog content via RSS, and I promised I'd do my best.

Frankly, I'm disappointed that I had so much trouble finding an RSS feed generator that was both free and good.  Everything out there either costs money, produces a hilariously barebones feed, doesn't produce completely valid RSS, or some combination of those.  That means I might as well write my own, which I'd actually wanted to avoid.  Ah well...  So now I have my own semi-valid barebones feed.  At least I can grow the features of the feed as I add those features to the site itself.  I do have the feed validating through an RSS validator, though it complains about some of my older posts (the new version of TinyMCE, which I use for post editing, produces way less spammy style garbage; and the validator is warning me about some of those old style attributes).  I haven't decided if I want to leave two posts with dodgy style attributes in the feed, or if it's worth my effort to go in and sanitize and re-sign the posts in question.

I'm also debating if I want to include my GPG signatures for articles in the feed.  I probably also should work out a cache on the feed itself, so that it doesn't have to regenerate this growing XML file at every request (which is dumb).  Ah well, dumb and working beats smart and broken, so at this time it'll do.  Fixing that will be reasonably high on my list.  Right now, I don't have too much content, so rebuilding the XML is no big deal.  But in the future, if I manage to keep after writing in this blog, that'll become more resource intensive than I'd like.