One Feed to Rule Them All

Last weekend I quietly launched another section in this website: a chronological feed that aggregates everything I post here, e.g. blog posts, quick reviews, photographies and cool links, all in one place.

I've struggled to think of a good name for it. I felt like "Timeline" could mean something else, as people usually use "Timeline" on their websites to talk about their life timeline or something like that. So, for now, I just went with "Feed". I like it because it's very creative.

The reasoning behind it is that I found it a bit annoying that you had to open 4 pages to see if I had posted anything new (unless you use RSS, which makes you awesome 🫶). Now, you only need to open one! I am sure everyone will make good use of these precious seconds that are being saved!

This is something I had designed quite a while ago, but always postponed building for some unknown reason. I took huge inspiration from the way Phanpy groups notifications by date, and did the same here. The initial idea was to have some fancy filtering, but I chose to skip it just so that I could get it out there. Maybe someday.

Dealing with the data fetching was also quite easy: even though Astro handles each post type as a separate collection, the fact that my website is static means I don't have to worry much about performance: I just query for everything, sort by date, then only get the posts I need (12-ish per page). It's only gonna run once anyway, so I don't have to do anything fancy for that query. Simplicity is awesome.

I also wanted to make sure days don't get cut off on pagination. i.e. if I'm showing 12 items per page but the 13th item is in the same day as the 12th one, they're gonna show up together. Again, easily doable because I load all posts before building the pages. It'd probably be very annoying to do otherwise.