Thanks! 🙂 I actually considered that approach at first, but decided to do it the “hard way” and learn everything from scratch 🎸

Once I realized how many small pieces of the album feed need updating for every release, I took it a step further and built my own offline album feed generator. It auto-fills the parts that never change (in the backend), pre-populates form fields for track durations and defaults for things that rarely change, and leaves clean fields for what needs updating each time. When everything’s filled out, it displays the full code and generates a correctly named XML file for download.

I also wanted the XML to be as clean and human-readable as possible (and sneak in a bit of personal branding), which added some extra complexity. But now it’s (hopefully) working exactly how I envisioned.