Improving My RSS Feed and Making It More Human Readable

I have always liked that RSS is boring in the best possible way. It does not need a recommendation engine. It does not need a timeline ranking model. It does not care whether a platform wants to show someone my post today. A feed is just a quiet agreement between a site and a reader: when I publish something new, your reader can come check. That is exactly the kind of web plumbing I want this site to have. But this week I noticed my own feed had gotten a little too quiet. The posts were showing up in some places, but the images were not behaving the way I expected. Feed readers were not consistently seeing the hero image for a post, and opening the feed directly in a browser looked like raw XML. Technically valid, maybe, but not exactly friendly. So I cleaned it up. What I wanted the feed to do The image logic was the first thing I wanted to fix. My actual post pages use Eleventy’s image transform, which means a hero image written in front matter as something like this: featuredImage:…