A Bilingual RSS Feed: Why I Still Keep It Around

gookkis.com has two separate RSS feeds: /rss.xml for Indonesian content and /en/rss.xml for English content, both generated straight from the same getBlogPosts() function used by the blog pages. A lot of people say RSS stopped mattering once Google Reader died years ago. I don’t agree, especially for a small blog like this one.

Reason one: serious readers still use RSS readers. People who genuinely follow technical writing usually already have a reader (Feedly, NetNewsWire, or just a personal aggregator) and prefer that over social media notifications that get lost to an algorithm.

Reason two: the cost is close to zero. Astro already makes it easy to generate a feed from the same content collection used to render the pages, via the @astrojs/rss helper — barely any added maintenance, just one rss.xml.js file per locale calling a function that already exists and mapping title, description, pubDate, and link.

Reason three: splitting by language actually matters. If I merged both languages into one feed, English-only readers would get notified about Indonesian posts they can’t read, and vice versa. Separate feeds mean every reader only gets what’s actually relevant to them.

RSS doesn’t need an algorithm, doesn’t need an account, and can’t be deprioritized by a third-party platform. For a personal blog that I fully control, that fits the whole philosophy of this site: simple, self-owned, not dependent on any platform.