Is there a way to parse external RSS Feeds with Jekyll?

Question

I have several websites and would like to show content via RSS like headlines in a Jekyll project. Is it possible to parse external rss feeds with jekyll and use them?

Answer 1

Yes. You'd either want to create a plugin to fetch and parse the external feeds during jekyll build or, plan B, you could always fetch and parse the feeds client-side with AJAX. Since you asked for a Jekyll answer, here's a rough approximation of the former approach:

# Runs during jekyll build
class RssFeedCollector < Generator
   safe true
   priority :high
   def generate(site)

      # TODO: Insert code here to fetch RSS feeds
      rss_item_coll = null;

      # Create a new on-the-fly Jekyll collection called "external_feed"
      jekyll_coll = Jekyll::Collection.new(site, 'external_feed')
      site.collections['external_feed'] = jekyll_coll

      # Add fake virtual documents to the collection
      rss_item_coll.each do |item|
         title = item[:title]
         content = item[:content]
         guid = item[:guid]
         path = "_rss/" + guid + ".md"
         path = site.in_source_dir(path)
         doc = Jekyll::Document.new(path, { :site => site, :collection => jekyll_coll })
         doc.data['title'] = title;
         doc.data['feed_content'] = content;
         jekyll_coll.docs << doc
      end
   end
end

You can then access the collection in your template like so:

{% for item in site.collections['external_feed'].docs %}
<h2>{{ item.title }}</h2>
<p>{{ item.feed_content }}</p>
{% endfor %}

There are a lot of possible variations on the theme but that's the idea.

Answer 2

Well, I don't think Jekyll per se can do that... because Jekyll is more of a CMS. However, Jekyll is written in Ruby can I believe you can easily run ruby/rake tasks with Jekyll (that's even probably what's being used when you build a Jekyll site), so I believe you should probably do that as a ruby script.