Before I begin, this post is not about generating an RSS page with Eleventy. If you need to do that, check the plugin that makes it (mostly) trivial to do. This post is about consuming RSS for your Eleventy site. I've got a page here (About) where I track my external articles and books. At work, we use Medium to host our blog and I've been publishing there as part of my job. I was curious how I could get that content on my About page as well.

First off, Medium publishes an RSS feed for every profile and publication. You can find details on their documentation, but for simple users like me, it's a simple matter of going from:

https://medium.com/@cfjedimaster

to

https://medium.com/feed/@cfjedimaster

This RSS feed contains articles I wrote in the past, pre-Adobe, as well as my content since joining Adobe. Basically, even though my articles are showing up in the Adobe publication, my RSS feed correctly shows everything I authored.

Alright, so adding this to my page means I need to parse RSS in Node. I've used rss-parser before and that's what I went with here. I created a new _data file named medium.js with this code:

const Parser = require('rss-parser');
let parser = new Parser();

module.exports = async function() {

	let feed = await parser.parseURL('https://medium.com/feed/@cfjedimaster');
	return feed.items;
	
};

The parser returns metadata about the RSS as well as the items, but all I care about is the items. I thought perhaps I'd do some transformation here as well, but I figured I'd add it to a template first and see if anything seemed necessary. Turns out I really didn't see a need.

So back in my About page (/about.md), I added the following:

<h3>Recent Articles on Medium</h3>

Here is my most recent set of articles on Medium. For a full list, 
see my [profile](https://medium.com/@cfjedimaster).

<ul>
{% for article in medium %}
<li><a href="{{ article.link }}">{{ article.title }}</a></li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>

I thought about adding the article date too, but decided to keep it simple. Here's the result rendered out:

And that's all there is to it. As a reminder, you can find the entire source code for this blog up in a public repo if you want to see it in context. If having the most up-to-date version of the feed is important, you've got a few options.

The simplest is to just schedule a build roughly along with the schedule that makes sense for the content you are ingesting. So if a feed updates about once a day, you could schedule a build once a day.

The other option is to track the RSS feed with Pipedream. One of their sample workflows demonstrates this: New Item in Feed from RSS API

If you find this useful, let me know!