After a couple recent complaints about the lack of an RSS feed for my site, I whipped up RSS support today in about four hours of ruby hacking. Most of the time was spent getting gemcast (my ruby-based weblog engine) to recognize new feed-oriented URLs. This meant making gemcast recognize "flavors" (like blosxom), although my implementation is not totally complete. The rest of the time was just wiring up a bit of code using ruby's RSS library (which took all of a half-hour or so). Then, I made links appear on the site, which required one template update and one code change (bummer).

For now, I'm serving up full HTML (from what I've read, that's A Bad Thing). It will have to do for a while, unless I get around to writing some sanitization code for HTML, which, to be honest, isn't bloodly likely.

Now, both of my readers can use aggregators to obtain my priceless content. Note that if you want to subscribe to only a given category, you can do that: just navigate to the category and click the RSS link at the top of the page, near the breadcrumb.

I'll be releasing a new version of gemcast with the RSS code soon - I just have to scour the code for any ugliness I created in the rush to get RSS working.