Starting an RSS Club

I added the ability to publish articles exclusively to the RSS feed. The idea for an RSS Club comes from Dave Rupert and friends.

To accomplish this, I added a new data field to the frontmatter of articles for flags. This is an enumerated array of special conditions for each entry. With Astro collections and Zod, the configuration looks like this:

flags: z.array(z.enum(["DRAFT", "RSS-ONLY"])).optional(),

I had previously built in logic to handle drafts with a boolean in the frontmatter, but I wasn’t interested in adding another z.boolean().optional() to the configuration. Flags gives me a pattern to quickly add additional conditions for instances like this.

To publish an article for the RSS Club, I just add this line to its frontmatter:

flags:
    - RSS-ONLY

Dave’s RSS Club creates pages for entries online – the links are just hidden from site navigation. My implementation differs in that the articles only exist within the rss.xml file. If you want to read that content, the only way to do so is with an RSS reader.

Join the club by subscribing to https://seanmcp.com/rss.xml