lean-rss-feed-website

A writing-first personal website powered by any RSS feed. Also easy to add your selected projects to it.

Fork it, set your RSS URL, deploy. Made for those willing to spend time building content, projects, and an audience, not figuring out complex frontend frameworks.

flowchart LR
  A[RSS Provider] -->|RSS XML| B[your-feed-url]
  B -->|daily cron| C[GitHub Actions]
  C -->|POST| D[Vercel Deploy Hook]
  D -->|npm run build| E[scripts/build.js]
  E -->|fetch + parse| B
  E -->|Handlebars + content| F[dist/index.html]
  F -->|deploy| G[your-site.com]

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How it works

• A build script fetches any RSS feed and parses it into posts
• Handlebars renders the template with your content (bio, work, posts)
• Output is a single index.html -- no server, no database
• GitHub Actions runs daily, triggers a Vercel redeploy, picks up new posts

Quick start

npm install
npm run build
open dist/index.html

Configure

Three data files (all gitignored, copy from .example.json):

File	Purpose
data/content.json	Site config, bio, links, RSS URL
data/writing.json	Auto-generated by build from RSS. Review before rebuild.
data/work.json	Selected work/projects, manually filled.

Each has a .example.json counterpart in the repo. Copy them to start:

cp data/content.example.json data/content.json
cp data/work.example.json data/work.json
cp data/writing.example.json data/writing.json

The RSS parser currently expects Substack-style XML. If your feed uses different elements, adjust scripts/build.js to match.

Deploy

Connect this repo to Vercel. The daily cron keeps your site in sync with your RSS source.

Tech

Node.js, Handlebars, RSS, vanilla CSS. One page.