Working RSS Feed in Astro

I’m currently using Astro to build this static web site. It’s a great platform in many respects, but making a working RSS feed with prerendered content embedded in the RSS XML feed is surprisingly difficult. Astro doesn’t provide an out of the box way to render content the same way it renders content (I don’t know why, it’s an annoying shortcoming). In other words, it’s hard to take a Markdown (or MDX) file and have it render exactly as it would appear on the page without creating essentially the same pipeline (no thanks!) .

I’ve got something that works, but it smells of HACK so badly that it makes me 🤢🤢🤢.

But I’ve got it working finally. And, the RSS feed now includes the “shorts” that I post most week-days.