Ask HN: What is setup for your static blog generator?

You do realize that Jekyll themes are basically just finished projects people use because they can't believe bothered to create their own site, right?

For your specific issue, and this is a general pandoc solution, filters with side effects could work. For example, you can write a filter that would extract and inspect the metadata and writes it to to an RSS XML file.

In Paru¹, the Ruby wrapper and interface to pandoc, a very naive solution could look like:

    #!/usr/bin/env ruby
    require "paru/filter"
    require "rss"

    RSS_FILE = "my-rss-file.rss"

    title = "No title"
    date = Time.now.to_s

    # Collect metadata information while filtering a document with pandoc
    Paru::Filter.run do 
        title = metadata["title"] if metadata.has_key? "title"
        date = metadata["date"] if metadata.has_key? "date"
    end

    # Create new Atom item
    new = RSS::Maker.make("atom") do |maker|
        maker.channel.author = maker.channel.about = maker.channel.title = ""
        maker.channel.updated = Time.now.to_s

        maker.items.new_item do |item|
            item.title = title
            item.updated = date
            item.link = "Some link"
        end
    end

    # Add new item to existing Atom RSS feed
    rss = RSS::Parser.parse(File.read(RSS_FILE), false)
    rss.items.concat new.items
    File.write(RSS_FILE, rss)

¹ https://heerdebeer.org/Software/markdown/paru/#writing-and-u...