Secret RSS Posts

I've seen Dave Rupert do posts that only appear in the RSS feed. He called it the RSS Club. In his words,

It’s like a newsletter delivered to your feed reader to celebrate the medium of RSS and breakaway from social media.

I like that ethos and am choosing to do the same. What posts will qualify as part of the RSS Club remains to be seen. Maybe they'll be more personal. Maybe they'll cover topics that don't need to be directly linked from home pages and index pages. Maybe I'll get bored of the idea and we never hear of this again.

And it's not like they'll be sooper-dooper secret because there will still be a web page that will be generated. You could still share and link the page, if you wanted. At least, for now. It's just that they won't be linked to from any of the index pages. Perhaps one day I'll look into creating content purely for the RSS feed that doesn't have a permalink generated for it. That'll require some tweaks to the RSS feed since it relies on the URL for things like the ID.

Consider this an invitation to subscribe to the RSS feed—if you haven't already—and perhaps some interesting content will find it's way to you.

Technical Bits

This site is built with 11ty. Every file—okay, not every file; I'm simplifying here—gets added to a collection. Files can be added to a specific collection using tags. When I first built this site, every blog post was tagged as a post. Then, I told the home page to grab the most recent posts. And the index view to grab all of the posts. And then the RSS feed should grab the ten most recent posts.

What I've done is added a new collection called rss and I changed the RSS feed to only grab items from the rss collection.

tags:
  - post
  - rss

This allows me to create content that only appears in the RSS feed or only appears on the site or appears in both. This system will be used for any new thing that I add. For example, if I add photography, I can create a photo tag and add the photos to the RSS feed or choose not to. I can add the photos to the Everything and Nothing index or I can create a separate photo feed altogether that just pulls anything tagged photo.