I follow Steve Messer’s blog – he’s a product manager in the UK Civil Service, making land and housing data easier to find, use and trust. And he writes weeknotes which I enjoy reading.

He mentioned this week that his team’s blog doesn’t produce an RSS feed. Well, I’ve just been doing that for my own blog so I thought, how hard can it be?

An hour later and I opened my pull request.

The Digital Land blog is an interesting beast, being built by a custom-built Python static site generator using gov.uk components and rendering with Jinja.

It’s been a couple of years since I last looked at much Python (probably whilst I was at GDS working as Head of Technology on the Clinically Extremely Vulnerable People Service) and I don’t think I’ve ever used Jinja, so my code is probably terrible but it does work on my machine!

Hopefully what I’ve done will be at least the right shaped answer, but I imagine one of their actual Python experts will fix up my PR nicely.

(also, it’s an Atom feed that I generated, not an RSS feed, but the title didn’t scan as nicely)

UPDATE: It’s merged! Look on my works ye mighty.