Adding SocialSpec to my site

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On Tuesday, Caleb Hailey announced SocialSpec around the premise that the future of social media is websites. This maps out a consistent way to expose key social data (about, contact, following) from your website based around existing standards and ways things are typically done already. This makes it very easy to adopt and add to an existing website - for me this meant the following:

Start with a feed

I'd previously ended up with my feeds available at multiple URLs so this was an opportunity to clean things up. Rather than just copying what I had to the feed.xml and feed.json locations and add more complexity, I decided to make these the definitive sources for my feed and redirected the old URLs to them through edge rules. To get Hugo to create an RSS feed in another location to the default index.xml (which I'd never liked), I created a custom output format for RSS and referenced this in the config. I already had a custom output format for jsonfeed as Hugo doesn't have that built in. My custom output references my adapted rss.xml, but you could just point to the built-in one. The config.yaml looks like this:

Hugo on Ricky Moorhouse

Adding SocialSpec to my site

Start with a feed