How should I approach making an RSS/Atom feed for my site?

[504slashdiv]

Hello! I want to ask about how I should approach making a feed for my site. I've been wanting to make a global feed that encapsulates basically everything on my site.

Currently, I have feeds for my blog, postroll, OC ask blog, and small status updates. However, they're all kind of dependent on other services like html blog and status.cafe. Only my OC ask blog feed is a manually updated xml file on my site. That's why i kind of want to consolidate all these feeds into one xml file, to make it so that it is hosted on my site, and so people don't have to subscribe to so many feeds.

However, I'm also intimidated by the idea that whenever I make a post/postroll item/update, I'll have to update another file in addition to making a new file, updating the index, and then updating the feed file. Does anyone have some kind of solution to this or tips on how to make it easier to update an xml file? Thank you so much!

[Dan Q]

There are tools that can combine multiple RSS feeds into a single one, if that would help? E.g. rssrssrssrss.com takes URLs of several RSS feeds as an input and produces as an output a URL that includes all of the items in all of those feeds. I haven't tried it, and there are other "competing" services (here's one, here are some more!), but it might be worth a look?

Alternatively, you could run something of your own (personally, this is what I'd do: I prefer to keep my tools under my own control: what if somebody else's service goes away or stops being free?). For example, I'm pretty-confident it'd be possible to write something that uses xq (a free command-line tool for manipulating XML; I've used its sister jq a lot!) to combine multiple RSS feeds into one.