destroytoday.com

RSS feed location

Previously, I served the site’s RSS feed /feed.xml, but despite having a proper meta link tag pointing to it, some RSS apps still couldn’t discover it. This made me realize that /feed.xml might not be as intuitive as it could be, so I initially changed the feed location to /rss, which feels easier to check and maybe more standardized? Then, as I was browsing the website of my good friend, Chris Shiflett, I realized he publishes multiple RSS feeds, located at /feeds/blog and /feeds/links to separate blog posts from links. I love this idea because it immediately makes me think about how folks might want to only subscribe to certain parts of my site.

Instead of restricting myself to the one feed, I opened up the possibility of multiple feeds in the future by following suit. Since the current feed is essentially for the entire site, I’m now serving it from /feeds/all, but still redirecting /rss to that location. Then, once I add more content types, like long-form blog posts or new portfolio pieces, I’ll create feeds for those, but still list them in the catch-all feed, too.

Along with making the site more future-proof, this change also gave me the opportunity to set up redirects, since existing subscribers would need to land on the new endpoint. Setting up the redirect was pretty straightforward with the @nuxt-community/redirect-module middleware, but I don’t love installing yet another stack-specific dependency simply to handle redirects compared to a system-level config. It’ll do for now.

I’m starting to think about routes for the rest of the site, which is why I wanted to set up the system for redirects. I’d like to move on from only having articles, which I think will help expose other scenarios to consider, like navigation. Every small change sprouts an entirely new branch of considerations to make. Good thing I enjoy building websites.