Jekyll RSS Feed Templates

A few Liquid templates to use for rendering RSS feeds for your Jekyll blog. Featuring four kinds of feeds:

• feed.xml — Renders the 10 most recent posts.
• feed.category.xml — Only renders posts for a specific category. This example renders posts for a "miscellaneous" category.
• feed.links.xml — Only contains posts that link to external websites noted by a link variable in the YAML Front Matter. Not a common Jekyll convention, but a good way to generating a linked list.
• feed.articles.xml — Only showing articles that don't link to external sites; The opposite of feed.links.xml.

How to use

• Update _config.yml as noted below, or manually replace the variables.
• Copy one of the xml (ie, feed.xml) files to the root directory of your Jekyll blog.
• Run jekyll.

In your generated _site folder you should find a properly formatted feed at feed.xml.

Customizing _config.yml

These templates rely on a customized version of _config.yml. The following lines have been added:

name: Your Blog's Name
description: A description for your blog
url: http://your-blog-url.example.com

This makes it easy to reference the title, description and URL for your site in the feed templates using {{ site.name }}, {{ site.description }} and {{ site.url }}. Even if you're not using these feed templates, you might find these variables useful when you're designing your layouts.

Miscellany

• Note on YAML Front Matter block: The xml files contain a YAML Front Matter block with the line layout: none. This is necessary because Jekyll will not process a page with Liquid unless there is a YAML block at the top of the file.
• RSS Autodiscovery: If your template is not already setup to do so, make sure the RSS feeds are discoverable by browsers, bots, etc: rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery
• Validation: You can use the W3C Validator to make sure your feeds are formatted correctly: http://validator.w3.org/feed/