Question

This may be a simple question, but for some reason I don’t know this answer. Is it possible to create an RSS feed file that contains contents for an entire year but only publishes the current date and previous date information?

I have a client that wants to do a “this day in history” post. Currently, I am using IFTTT, and created around sixty dated posts for the next two months. Of course, this works — but it is very labor intensive.

Is it possible to create an RSS feed that you could put all 365 days of data in to, but if someone pulls up the feed it only shows today’s item and prior days in the feed?

Or is RSS not the proper technology to do this? The reason I am using RSS is for ease of use, and IFTTT will take those RSS feeds and pump it in to Facebook and Twitter for automatic status updates for my client.

Answer 1

Here is what I ended up doing

1. Using the Drupal backend of my website, I created a content type specifically for these posts.
2. I created individual articles for each day, and used the schedule module to schedule the publish date to the date I wanted.
3. I created an RSS feed of these posts through Drupal.
4. I linked the newly created RSS feed to IFTTT.
5. Created an IFTTT recipe to post the text from the RSS feed to Facebook/Twitter/etc.

It wasn’t the best solution, but it worked. I was really trying to do this without having to rely on a third-party such as IFTTT, but never really figured out a good way to do it.