RSS Feed Generation

[dragonstyle]

Discussed in #7280

^{Originally posted by prncevince October 18, 2023}

Description

Quarto Website Document Listing Feeds Reference:

• https://quarto.org/docs/websites/website-listings.html#feeds

It appears that the following option includes a large portion of the HTML webpage (everything in <main> after <header>) in the <item><description> tag/node of an RSS feed document XML format document:

listing:
  feed:
    type: full

Additionally, it appears that the following option includes the contents of the first <p> encountered after <main><header> HTML tag within <item><description> of the XML:

listing:
  feed:
    type: partial

This can significantly reduce the amount of HTML content pushed to the RSS feed XML document.

Additionally, options like YAML header metadata descriptions for listing item pages do not get pushed to the RSS feed file in either of these options.

I'm new to the RSS feed game, but I believe that storing rich content (e.g. iframes from widgets) may be overkill. This can produce very large RSS feeds that popular RSS readers (e.g. Feedly), do not actually parse. Additionally, if the goal is to generate additional custom content automatically from the RSS feed (e.g. a newsletter), this type of content may not be desired.

I guess that one could run a post processing text parsing script on their Quarto project to remove such content from the <description><![CDATA[[ ...]]></description> XML tag using project:post-render.

Or maybe more options could be built-in to base Quarto as extra listing:feed:type options?

Or possible, a listing:feed:remove field can be added to selectively remove rich content based on scraping search matches?

e.g. [no-iframes, no-social-embeds, etc.]

Thoughts? Thanks!

[evmckinney9]

I'd like to see this feature as well.

Additionally, options like YAML header metadata descriptions for listing item pages do not get pushed to the RSS feed file in either of these options.

I would prefer if posts in the RSS feed had the actual post's description rather than the current behavior, which seems to be the entire text of the blog post. The RSS specification confirms the description attribute only needs to be a synopsis.

---

To clarify, here is example post from quarto's RSS feed:

<item>
<title>Quarto for Academics</title>
<dc:creator>Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel</dc:creator>
<link>https://quarto.org/docs/blog/posts/2023-05-22-quarto-for-academics/</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[ <p>Quarto offers a myriad of features that are especially useful for academics, as educators and as researchers. These range from chunk options that enable automatic linking of code to documentation, to article templates for manuscript submission to multiple journals. The following video walks you through some of these features.</p> <div class="quarto-video ratio ratio-16x9"><iframe data-external="1" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/EbAAmrB0luA" title="" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></div> <p>Select highlights include:</p> <ul> <li>Linking to documentation from code with <a href="../../../../docs/output-formats/html-code.html#code-linking"><code>code-link</code></a>.</li> <li>Informative YAML errors and YAML completion.</li> <li>Creating Quarto slides with <a href="../../../../docs/presentations/revealjs/">revealjs</a>.</li> <li><a href="../../../../docs/presentations/revealjs/presenting.html#print-to-pdf">PDF export</a> of HTML slides.</li> <li>Annotating slides with <a href="../../../../docs/presentations/revealjs/presenting.html#chalkboard"><code>chalkboard</code></a>.</li> <li>Advancing slides for your audience with <a href="../../../../docs/presentations/revealjs/presenting.html#multiplex"><code>multiplex</code></a>.</li> <li>Highlighting code with <a href="../../../../docs/presentations/revealjs/#line-highlighting"><code>code-line-numbers</code></a>.</li> <li>Customizing output location with <a href="../../../../docs/presentations/revealjs/index.html#output-location"><code>output-location</code></a>.</li> <li>Showing code chunk fences with <a href="../../../../docs/computations/execution-options.html#fenced-echo"><code>echo: fenced</code></a>.</li> <li><a href="../../../../docs/authoring/code-annotation.html">Code annotation</a>.</li> <li>Authoring manuscripts with Quarto <a href="../../../../docs/journals/index.html">journal templates</a>.</li> <li><a href="../../../../docs/visual-editor/technical.html#citations">Inserting citations</a> from Zotero or from a DOI with the <a href="../../../../docs/visual-editor/">RStudio Visual Editor</a>.</li> </ul> <p>If you would like to follow along as you watch, you can find the source code for everything created in the video in <a href="https://github.com/mine-cetinkaya-rundel/quarto-for-academics">this GitHub repository</a>.</p> ]]>
</description>
<category>Learn</category>
<guid>https://quarto.org/docs/blog/posts/2023-05-22-quarto-for-academics/</guid>
<pubDate>Mon, 22 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
<media:content url="https://quarto.org/docs/blog/posts/2023-05-22-quarto-for-academics/quarto-for-academics-video-cover.png" medium="image" type="image/png" height="80" width="144"/>
</item>

However, the actual post description:
A video highlighting some of Quarto’s features that are especially useful for academics, as educators and as researchers. is absent, which is what I would prefer to be able to set in-place of the full post text.

[dragonstyle]

(Note that the partial contents of the feed already represent a thinned version of HTML which doesn't include elements such as iframes. If there are specific examples of tags shouldn't be present in this partial preview, we should open issues to track that specifically).

[maximlt]

This issue is not ticket in #7906. Should it be re-opened?

[cwickham]

@maximlt It moved to #8303 ...and currently working on it.