Building and deploying a Digital Garden with MkDocs with an RSS Feed#

2024 is coming to an end, and I had to update my digital garden. I wanted to add an RSS feed since quite a lot (thanks Kenobit). I realized there is the MkDocs RSS Plugin designed to do exactly that: create RSS feeds from MkDocs websites.

So I poetry added that and… nope. I needed a Python version update. Why was the update version so old (3.8)? BFor building reasons: Netlify used to have that back in the days. Can we improve and update that? Yup! In fact it turned out my builds on Netlify were failing (this time for a NodeJS update).

So late 2024 update consisted in:

  1. fixing deploy settings on Netlify (use a new branch with updated python versions)
  2. create the new RSS version of the website with MkDocs.

First part was easiesh. The second had a few more steps:

  1. get a new branch
  2. get a new devcontainer with python 3.10. Rerun the container so that it updates properly.
  3. install all the poetry machinery on the container - why was poetry there? Mmm… maybe I was experimenting back in the days
  4. find a suitable combination of requirements for all the moving MkDocs parts. Basically relearn all the poetry add and update parts and the .toml syntax for the versions. I had way too many numbers instead of wildcards. I also had to install pipx to install poetry and have it into the container.

There were compromises to be made. Material theme did not want to run locally because of jinjia template issue with an icon. I also had issues with fontawesome_markdown markdown extension in the .yml. So I searched for themes (thank you mkdocs catalog) and ended up having terminal working.

Oh, if you are a feed nerd, there’s an entry for the garden RSS feed.

Fixme / Next steps#

  • Make the RSS autodiscoverable (Vivaldi is not showing the feed)
  • bring material back on next deploy?