---
title: An RSS Feed with Hakyll
image: /images/rss.png
thumbnail: /images/thumbnail-rss.png
lang: en
website: dev
---
Twitter is a really cool social network. I daily use it and I discover a lot of new stuff with it. Unfortunately, it's a company, and they need to earn some money. More and more often, Twitter shows me unwanted content like *tweets you could like*, *accounts to follow* or *what happens when you're away*.
I don't want all these features, I just want the tweets of people I follow in chronological order. What I want is an RSS feed.
### Add an RSS feed in Hakyll
It's a really simple operation, everything is explained [here](http://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/tutorials/05-snapshots-feeds.html). In the tutorial, they explain how to render either an Atom or an RSS feed. I decided to provide both. To do that, I've created a small function named `createFeed`.
```hs
createFeed :: Identifier -> RenderingFunction -> Rules ()
```
Where `RenderingFunction` is the signature provided by Hakyll for `renderAtom` and `renderRss`.
```hs
type RenderingFunction = FeedConfiguration
-> Context String
-> [Item String]
-> Compiler (Item String)
```
Then, my function is just a copy paste from the function in the tutorial.
```hs
createFeed name renderingFunction = create [name] $ do
route idRoute
compile $ do
posts <- fmap (take 10) . recentFirst =<<
loadAllSnapshots "posts/*" "content"
renderingFunction myFeedConfiguration feedCtx posts
```
Eventually, I just need to call my new function for `renderAtom` and `renderRss`.
```hs
createFeed "feed.xml" renderRss
createFeed "atom.xml" renderAtom
```
### The HTML part
To make my feeds work with most of the aggregators, I need to add two `links` to my default template.
```html
```
### Which reader
I personally use [FreshRSS](http://freshrss.org/). It's a simple, self-hostable aggregator under the AGPL license. The installation is really simple and there is a lot of useful features (like keyboard shortcuts and integration with [Wallabag](https://www.wallabag.org/))
