I created a series of rss feeds for various categories on level up lunch. At the time of this post there isn't a great customizable jekyllrb rss plugin so I built it with a liquid template. With a recent update of jekyll, I noticed that the templates weren't being processed. One thing I forgot is in order for jekyll to process the file it must be wrapped in front matter YAML block. It must be the first thing in the file and be valid YAML set between triple-dashed lines. So for example, the how to append text to a file in java looks like this:
---
layout: java-examples
title: "Append text to file"
date: 2013-10-25 04:40:30
tags: java java-io
permalink: /java/examples/append-text-to-file/
author: Justin Musgrove
description: "Example shows how to write a string to a file. Demonstrated by using Guava Files.append, Apache FileUtils.writeStringToFile, FileWriter and Java 7"
---For the rss we don't have any variables to be processed so we wrap with an empty front matter YAML block. Level up lunches blog rss.xml now looks like this:
---
---
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<channel>
<title>Level Up Lunch</title>
<description></description>
<link>http://www.leveluplunch.com</link>
<atom:link href="http://www.leveluplunch.com/feed/rss.xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
{ for post in site.posts limit:10 }
<item>
<title><![CDATA[]]></title>
<description><![CDATA[]]></description>
<pubDate></pubDate>
<link>http://www.leveluplunch.com</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.leveluplunch.com</guid>
</item>
{ endfor }
</channel>
</rss>