RSS feed updates

This blog was powered by MDX (markdown + JSX) for a couple of years (after migrating from Rails back in like 2018), which I quite liked but which had some drawbacks. The biggest of which was that my RSS feed couldn't display full posts, since the markdown parsing library I was using couldn't easily render the custom components in my posts to a nice easy string of HTML for the feed.

This same drawback is to blame for a lack of full-post support on a couple of high-profile RSS feeds, like Lee Robinson's or Shawn "Swyx" Wang's: instead, they show short post summaries, with links to the full post on their website. I think this sort of breaks the whole point of RSS: I want to be able to read all of my favourite writers without having to tramp across the untamed moorlands of the world wide web.

I mentioned in my 2021 post that I had changed my website's data source from a bunch of .mdx files stored in the repository to a CraftCMS backend—which has so far been wildly successful. And one of the great things about it is being able to render out posts—like this one—directly to accessible, parseable HTML for your reading pleasure.

(If your RSS reader has suddenly crawled a bunch of new posts from me, I apologise for that—feel free to mark them all as read. I'll be good from now on.)