Builds on top of #142.

What this changes

The site now publishes an RSS feed of new patterns at /feed_rss_created.xml. RSS is the open standard that lets people add a website to a "feed reader" (Feedly, NetNewsWire, Inoreader, even some email clients) and get a notification whenever something new is published — like a podcast subscription, but for articles.

Each item in the feed includes:

• The pattern's title and link.
• The publication date (first time the pattern was added to the repo).
• A one-line summary, taken from the first paragraph of the pattern.
• Every author credited with a clickable link to their ORCID profile — so a reader who subscribes can hover over a name and jump straight to that researcher's full publication history on ORCID.org.

How readers find it

Three ways:

1. A short "Stay in the loop" section on the home page, right under the patterns listing, with a "Subscribe" link.
2. A subscribe line at the bottom of every author page (for example on /authors/ciara-flanagan/).
3. Browser autodiscovery — when someone opens any pattern page in a feed-reader-aware browser or in a reader app, the feed shows up automatically as a "Subscribe" option. This is the standard way most RSS subscribers find feeds in 2026.

What this doesn't change

• No changes to how you write or edit patterns. The feed reads the same authors: frontmatter and authors.yml that Make an index of authors #89 #141 introduced — you don't need to do anything new.
• No changes to which authors have ORCIDs displayed; authors without an ORCID in authors.yml simply appear in the feed without a link, the same way they do on pattern pages.
• The home page, the navigation, and pattern pages all look almost the same — the only visible change is the small "Stay in the loop" section on the home page.

One thing worth flagging to contributors

CONTRIBUTING.md has been updated to say this explicitly, but: a contributor's ORCID, if they provide one, will now travel further than before — it appears in every RSS item for every pattern they've co-authored, not just on the pattern page itself. It's still the same ORCID iD they're already publishing on their profile, and it's still optional, but it's worth being upfront about. Anyone uncomfortable with that can simply leave the orcid: field out of their entry.

What to click on the preview site

• / — scroll past the patterns listing to "Stay in the loop"; click the RSS feed link.
• /feed_rss_created.xml directly — this is the raw feed (XML). It's not designed for humans, but a quick check that it loads and that author names appear is reassuring.
• /authors/ciara-flanagan/ — scroll to the bottom; the subscribe line is below the patterns list.
• Open any pattern page in Firefox or a feed-reader app — the autodiscovery link means the reader will find the feed without you having to copy a URL.

Stacking

This PR stacks on top of #142, which stacks on top of #141. Please merge #141 first, then #142, then this one — once each is in, the next rebases automatically onto main.

Follow-ups (already filed as separate issues)

A pre-merge review surfaced three useful improvements that are bigger than this PR and are tracked separately so they don't block this one merging:

• RSS: per-tag feeds, an Atom variant, and a JSON Feed mirror #145 — Broader feed coverage: feeds filtered by tag, an Atom variant, and a JSON Feed mirror for more modern reader apps.
• Scholarly identifiers: DOIs for patterns, ROR IDs for affiliations #146 — Scholarly identifiers: minting a DOI for each pattern via Zenodo, ROR IDs for affiliations, and surfacing both in the feed metadata.
• Authors hook: tests, an RSS icon, and small RSS polish #147 — Tests and small UX polish: automated tests for the authors hook, an RSS icon for the subscribe link, consistent wording across surfaces, and revisiting the per-author placement.

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