Creating Atom feeds

A really useful feature for any blog is to have the ability for your readers to keep up-to-date with the latest content. This most commonly happens with an RSS reader client that polls your RSS subscription feed. While RSS is widely used, a better, more mature subscription format is available and is called Atom.

Both are files that can be requested by a client, and are standard and simple XML data structures. Fortunately, an Atom feed generator is built into Flask; or, more specifically, a contributed module is built into the WSGI interface that Flask uses called Werkzeug.

Getting it up-and-running is simple, all we need to do is to get hold of our most recently published posts from the database. It may be best to create a new Blueprint for this; however, you can also do it within your main.py. We just need to make use of a few more modules:

from urlparse import urljoin
from flask import request, url_for
from werkzeug.contrib.atom import AtomFeed
from models import Entry...