Some Rss Feed Updates

If you have your RSS reader set to check for updates far too frequently, you may have noticed a bunch of noise coming across the wire on my feed. In this case it was definitely true - it’s not you, it’s me.

I use Hugo as a static site generator to manage this site, which has been good. I got RSS by default because Hugo enables it out of the box. However, it’s default choices aren’t particularly great - I just haven’t had the time or energy to address how I would like to present content, so it’s been “good enough.”

Before

Previously, the template included basic author information (name, email), the post date, the short summary, and a permalink reference. VERY barebones.

Now

My primary goal was to include full post text into the RSS feed; I don’t like it when feeds force me to a web browser to read content, so I don’t want to do that to anyone else.

• Added full content
• Added the summary above full content as a tl;dr
• Move full content to the <content:encdoed> RSS item
• Leave only the summary in the <description> RSS item
• Add a footer with call to Fediverse, email, or /find-me for discussions
• Add a footer with the permalink

Then

The basic layout is set, but there are some details to button up; I’ll do those as rolling updates instead of flooding RSS notifications for my testing.

• Embed a post’s featured image into the feed between the tl;dr and full content
• Strip out any stray small JS functions that are used (such as lightboxes)
• Fix photo/image handling
• Sort out a more dynamic way to handle footer callbacks; everything is hard coded right now and I don’t like that

Hopefully this will make the RSS experience better for the 2 subscribers that read it. (In all actuality, I don’t know how many it is - I don’t have any analytics set up on this site, and people don’t tend to respond, so…yeah.)