Adding an RSS feed to GitHub Pages
Yesterday I decided to add an RSS feed to this blog. I hoped that it was going to be easy since the blog is built with Jekyll and hosted on GitHub Pages. There must be something already build-in, right?
Well, it turned out there was! The setup was a piece of cake 🍰
Here’s how I did it in just three steps:
Step 1
I added the following lines to _config.yml:
plugins:
- jekyll-feed
title: Dzhavat Ushev Blog
description: Welcome to my blog
author: Dzhavat Ushev
GitHub Pages support a list of plugins but not all of them are enabled by default. jekyll-feed is one of those. To enable it, the only thing I had to do was add it to plugins.
After pushing this to GitHub, the site was rebuild and a feed.xml file was generated. I could access it at <website-name>.github.io/feed.xml.
The properties title, description and author are optional. I added them because I wasn’t happy with the defaults. For more settings, check out the jekyll-feed repo.
Step 2
The next step was to add this line in the head of all HTML layout files:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="{{ site.title }}" href="/feed.xml">
Note: {{ site.title }} refers to the title property set in _config.yml.
This helps if someone wants to subscribe to my blog using a feed reader, like Feedly.
Step 3
The final step was to make a link to the feed that is accessible from each page. In my case this looked like this:
<a class="btn btn-rss" href="/feed.xml" target="_blank">RSS</a>
That’s it! This took me a few minutes to figure this out and now I have an RSS feed of my posts. Subscribe if you want to read them. 😊