Generate RSS/Atom feeds for chronological notes

yousefamar commented 2 years ago

Please select if your request is either something new or an enhancement

[ ] Enhancement of an existing Feature.
[x] Request of a new feature.

Please select the area your request applies to. (Multiple selections are Possible. You can leave blank if you're not sure.)

[ ] Workspace - VSCode workspace, vaults, Intellisense/autocomplete, Dendron settings
[ ] Lookup - Dendron's Lookup Command
[ ] Views - Dendron Preview, Tree View, Side Panels in the UI
[ ] Schema - Dendron Schemas
[x] Pod - Data import from / export to Dendron
[x] Publish - External Site Publish
[ ] Markdown - Markdown features, such as syntax support and features

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe

I would like to consolidate blogging to Dendron. One missing feature is for an RSS/Atom feed to be generated from a series of chronological posts (articles, changelogs, journal entries, meeting minutes, whatever). The problems this would solve:

Humans would be able to follow the notes you publish in any RSS reader
The feed can be used as an input for e.g. mailing lists (e.g. poor man's Substack: connecting your blog RSS feed to Mailchimp)

Describe the solution you'd like

To be able to generate an RSS/Atom feed along with publishing. Jekyll does this globally for blogs, and e.g. 11ty has a plugin for it, but for Dendron nextjs it would really make most sense to be able to do this at a certain level of hierarchy, emitting for example projects.myapp.changelog.xml, and journal.daily.xml.

In order for this to actually be visible, something like a clickable RSS icon in the footer of affected notes would be useful, but alternatively if the xml is emitted in the assets dir, it can just be linked to normally from a top-level note.

One problem is that refactoring will break URLs that people are already subscribed to, so maybe <some_hash>.xml would be better, but then in that case there would need to be some way to create a special link to it (or the icon approach).

Describe alternatives you've considered

Haven't really considered an alternative except building this myself (as a Pod maybe?). I don't know a lot about the format, but turns out I don't need to, thanks to libraries like this. The hard part is probably finding a way for this to fit in nicely with Dendron and to be able to configure it, so I'm not sure if you would want this within Dendron proper, or as a Pod or similar.

Additional context

Related to #1622, discussed on Discord here and here.

kevinslin commented 2 years ago

Thanks for the request - this is something we are planning on adding to our publishing feature set. Hard to give ETA right now but before summer time 😅

yousefamar commented 2 years ago

Cool! With some specs, I'd be more than happy to contribute any way I can if it helps.

invakid404 commented 1 year ago

@kevinslin any updates on this? It's a feature I've been interested in for a while. I'd be willing to help out with whatever to push it forward as well.

yousefamar commented 1 year ago

If publishing collections has an up-to-date equivalent, something comparatively much easier would be to simply mark the output up with h-feed classes. This would allow the use of readers that support h-feed or microsub, but at the same time you could bridge between that and RSS/Atom feeds through Granary. I do this for my blog (not using Dendron). No need for extra xml files to be generated and you don't have to juggle with what things can become feeds, as the mapping between collection and feed is 1:1.

dendronhq / dendron