eleventy-activity-feed
Activity feed lets you build one centralized RSS feed that pulls in new entries from a bunch of different social networking sites. Support for (one or more) YouTube, RSS or Atom for existing blogs, Mastodon (via RSS), and your Twitter account (contributions for more are welcome!).
This allows you to encourage folks to subscribe in one location and you can control how that feed is populated later.
As a completely hypothetical example, if/when Twitter dies in a burning fire and you want to remove that channel from your centralized feed, you can do so and still keep all of your existing subscribers!
Limitations:
- This is not a permanent data store or archival tool for your content. This does not (yet?) fetch old data beyond the initial page of results for each activity type’s API. This is merely a aggregation and rebroadcast tool for your new content in RSS.
Caching Notes:
- When used in a static build, this will only update the feed when your build runs. I’d recommend setting up a recurring build to generate your feed regularly (maybe daily?). You could use this in serverless mode if you wanted!
- If on Netlify, I would also recommend using the
netlify-plugin-cacheplugin to persist your API fetch call cache across builds. You can see an example of this on the Eleventy Fetch docs. You can control the maximum frequency at which new fetches are made to the APIs usingfeed.setCacheDuration("4h");
Demo
You can subscribe to the following Eleventy feed in your RSS reader of choice to see it in action:
Installation
npm install @11ty/eleventy-activity-feed
Twitter User activity requires a TWITTER_BEARER_TOKEN environment variable (you can put this in a .env file).
Sample Eleventy Template
- Use
follow-feed.11ty.cjsin an ESM project (if"type": "module"in yourpackage.json) - Use
follow-feed.11ty.jsin a CommonJS project
module.exports = class {
data() {
return {
// Controls where the file is written
permalink: "/follow.rss"
}
}
async render() {
const { ActivityFeed } = await import("@11ty/eleventy-activity-feed");
let feed = new ActivityFeed();
feed.setCacheDuration("4h");
// YouTube
feed.addSource("youtubeUser", "YouTube", "UCskGTioqrMBcw8pd14_334A");
// Blog
feed.addSource("atom", "Blog", "https://www.11ty.dev/blog/feed.xml");
// Mastodon
feed.addSource("rss", "Mastodon", "https://fosstodon.org/users/eleventy.rss");
// Twitter
feed.addSource("twitterUser", "Twitter", "eleven_ty", "949639269433380864");
return feed.toRssFeed({
title: "Eleventy’s Activity Feed",
language: "en",
url: "https://www.11ty.dev/follow/",
subtitle: "One centralized feed of Eleventy activity across the web.",
});
}
};Add to the <head> of your page to show it in RSS readers:
<link rel="alternate" href="/follow.rss" title="Eleventy’s Activity Feed" type="application/rss+xml">What’s Next?
Happy to accept PRs for better HTML display of different feed entries (YouTube needs URL-><a> linkified descriptions and Twitter could use @-username links on content) and addition of more types of data! Feel free to contribute!
Check out the issue tracker.