Adding an RSS feed to GitHub Pages

This post was originally published on my blog.

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Yesterday I decided to add an RSS feed to my blog. I hoped that it was going to be easy since the blog is build with Jekyll and hosted on GitHub Pages. There must be something already build-in, right?

Well, it turned out that there was! And the setup was a piece of cake 🍰

Here are the steps that I took:

• Opened the _config.yml file and added the following lines:

plugins:
  - jekyll-feed
title: Dzhavat Ushev’s blog
description: Welcome to my blog
author: Dzhavat Ushev

Apparently, GitHub Pages supports a list of plugins but not all of them are enabled by default. jekyll-feed is one of them. To enable it, the only thing I had to do was add it to plugins array in the _config.yml file.

After pushing this to GitHub, the site was rebuild and a feed.xml file was generated. I could access at site.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.

• 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">

This helps if someone wants to subscribe to my blog using a feed reader, like Feedly.

• 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 just a few minutes to figure this out and now I have an RSS feed of my posts. Subscribe if you want to read them. 😊