rsrss

rsrss is a really simple RSS feed generator. It's written in PHP and is entirely HTML and CSS. It's lightweight and easy to install. Just download the zip file, unzip it, copy the files to your webserver, and change 3 settings.

Source Code

Prerequisites

A webserver with PHP support.

Installation

Download rsrss.zip and unzip it.
Copy the resulting feed folder to a directory on your webserver
Change the values in feed/settings.php
- Required settings - change these before first run
  - passphrase: The password you'll use to make posts. Don't leave as the default, since that is public
  - siteUrl: The URL of your website, e.g. https://example.com
  - siteTitle: A short description of your site. This will display on the index and the RSS feed.
- Optional settings - change these if you want to change the default behavior
  - showRelativeTime: How to display post times on the feed page
    - true (default) - display time as "x minutes/hours/days/... ago"
    - false - display time in UTC
  - path: The folder you're serving rsrss from.
    - feed (default) - serve from http://example.com/feed
  - postsInFeeds: The number of posts to show in feeds. (default) 25

Make posts.json and rss.xml writable

chmod 0666 posts.json
chmod 0666 rss.xml

Browse to https://your-server.com/feed

Usage

rsrss is a single page. When you browse to rsrss, you'll see the feed. To make a post:

Click on "Post an update" to show the post form
Enter your post in the "Update" box
Enter your password in the "Password" box
Click "Post"

Your post will appear in the feed and will be added to the RSS feed.

RSS feed

rsrss provides an RSS feed at feed/rss.xml. It's referenced in the metadata of the main page, so RSS Readers can discover it. If you want it to be discoverable from your site's main page, just add the to the <head> section:

<link rel="alternate"
      type="application/rss+xml"
      title="My RSS Feed"
      href="feed/rss.xml">

You can set title to whatever you'd like.

Acknowledgements

rsrss borrows heavily from the philosophy and the code of:

baccyflap's webring and guestbook
Shannon Kay's guestbook

Background

When I started down this indie/personal/small/smol/ ... you get the idea ... web journey, I didn't really get it. I mean, I got the motivation and I feel it - I would prefer a more decentralized, more personal, less commercial internet than what it has become.

But I wanted to contribute and I didn't really get the spirit of small, personal websites. I've seen a lot of people say they wish there were a way to host a simple RSS feed so they can post short updates that friends can follow. I thought this was something I could do, and so I wrote what I considered to be a simple feed generator. I called it tkr. I really like tkr. I'm proud of it. But it's not simple.

Don't get me wrong, it could be much more complicated than it is. But I've been a sysadmin/devops person for 30 years and I carried all that background into tkr. I figured nobody would want to use something I wrote unless I built in a bunch of logging, security, testing, slick admin interfaces, etc. Turns out that's not the case.

Since writing tkr, I've learned about the cool things other people have done for personal websites and just how simple a php app can be. This is my attempt to write a feed generator in that image.