A blog isn’t complete without a feed, so that was the first thing to add. Luckily there’s a good tutorial on adding a feed in Hakyll. The following code snippets are basically just copied from that tutorial.

I’ve also decided to start publishing the result; it’s available on my github pages.

RSS or atom?

I decided to use atom since it’s a standard. Yeah, not more to write about that I suppose.

Code changes

The first thing to do was to add a feed configuration. It’s a simple adaption on what’s found in the tutorial.

postFeedConfig :: FeedConfiguration
postFeedConfig = FeedConfiguration
    { feedTitle = "Magnus web site"
    , feedDescription = "Random stuff"
    , feedAuthorName = "Magnus Therning"
    , feedAuthorEmail = "magnus@therning.org"
    , feedRoot = "http://magthe.github.io"
    }

Then the build logic has to be extended with a rule for making atom.xml. This is also a straight forward adaptation of the information found in the tutorial.

    create ["atom.xml"] $ do
        route idRoute
        compile $ do
            posts <- fmap (take 50) . recentFirst =<< loadAllSnapshots "posts/*" "posts-content"
            let feedCtx = baseCtx <> bodyField "description"
            renderAtom postFeedConfig feedCtx posts

Once again the snapshot of the posts comes in handy. Since the old WordPress site limited the feed to the 50 latest posts I decided to do that in the new one too. Maybe it’s a bit excessive, 10-20 ought to be enough, but I’ll leave it for now. The feed-specific context is a little nice details, also from the tutorial. The feed builder requires the presence of a description for each post, but to avoid having to remember to add one to all posts I just add a description field containing the body of the post.

The generated feed is available at ./atom.xml