Category listing on blog home page not linking to all posts in a category

[harrelfe]

I am converting my blog fharrell.com to Quarto. The new test site is https://hbiostat.org/blog . My problem is that on the home page, even though I see correct category counts, linking to one of the categories does not pop up the entire set of posts that have that category; only a subset of articles is shown.

Here's index.qmd:

---
title: "Statistical Thinking"
listing:
  - id: post
    contents: post/**/*.qmd
    sort: "date desc"
    type: default
    fields: [date, title, description, categories, author, reading-time]
    categories: true
    sort-ui: false
    filter-ui: false
    page-size: 3
  - id: talk
    contents: talk/**/*.qmd
    sort: "date desc"
    type: default
    fields: [date, title, description, categories, author]
    categories: true
    sort-ui: false
    filter-ui: false
    page-size: 3
page-layout: full
title-block-banner: false
include-in-header: meta.html
toc: true
---

## Posts

::: {#post}
:::

## Talks

::: {#talk}
:::

And here is post/index.qmd:

---
title: "Statistical Thinking"
listing:
  - id: post
    contents: post/**/*.qmd
    sort: "date desc"
    type: default
    fields: [date, title, description, categories, author, reading-time]
    categories: true
    sort-ui: false
    filter-ui: false
    page-size: 3
  - id: talk
    contents: talk/**/*.qmd
    sort: "date desc"
    type: default
    fields: [date, title, description, categories, author]
    categories: true
    sort-ui: false
    filter-ui: false
    page-size: 3
page-layout: full
title-block-banner: false
include-in-header: meta.html
toc: true
---

## Posts

::: {#post}
:::

## Talks

::: {#talk}
:::

Most of my articles have headers like this one:

---
title: Road Map for Choosing Between Statistical Modeling and Machine Learning
author:
  - name: Frank Harrell<br><small>`@f2harrell`</small>
    url: https://hbiostat.org
    affiliation: Vanderbilt University<br>School of Medicine<br>Department of Biostatistics
date: 2018-04-30
modified: 2021-06-04
categories: [data-science, machine-learning, prediction, 2018]
description: "This article provides general guidance to help researchers choose between machine learning and statistical modeling for a prediction project."
---

I created one post that uses the "one line per category" form for categories and it did not result in that post being linked from the home categories page either.

Any help appreciated.
Frank

[dragonstyle]

I don't fully understand why this is happening, but I have at least one clue. The listing filtering / sorting is implemented on the client side (javascript) by literally reading the HTML structure and attributes. When I look at this page:

https://hbiostat.org/blog/post/#category=

I can see that something is definitely a little funky with the posts starting at 'Assessing the Proportional Odds Assumption...'. It seems like somehow we've produced malformed HTML, and as a result the dynamic listing filtering / sorting isn't actually seeing any of the items on the page past that item.

I'm not 100% sure how this came to be - if you happen to have any clues about something on that page in particular, it would be pretty helpful (perhaps we're letting something through that we shouldn't be or we're creating invalid HTML for listings in some other way)?

[harrelfe]

Thanks for the detective work Charles. I thought you were on to something because that article used some advanced HTML. But I took that out and the problem persists (the test blog has been updated to reflect this change). How did you see something funky? Perhaps if I could see what you saw it would clue me to looking at an article more downstream.

[dragonstyle]

Thank you for trying that! Very much appreciate all the exercise you're giving the system.

I still see the 'funkiness'. What I'm seeing is a slight difference in formatting for that item when listed here:

https://hbiostat.org/blog/post/#category=

(larger margin, sort of offset right, missing bottom separator).

I wonder if you'd mind testing my theory by excluding that post temporarily (perhaps just rename it so it isn't a qmd or just move delete the post temporarily). If that resolves the problem, I think we could then focus on exactly what it is about that post that is tickling this issue (and hopefully that there is some fix I can make to stop this from happening!).

[harrelfe]

Glad to help exercise the system!

I renamed that post's index.qmd to junk and all the problems were fixed, as you thought. The source for that post is here: https://hbiostat.org/attach/index.qmd

I'm looking closely at the script now to see if there is anything different about it when compared to the other posts. At present I don't see anything weird. There is an image inclusion near the top:

![![](pomap.png){ width="100%" }](https://atlas.mindmup.com/vbiostat/po)

[harrelfe]

Found it! I had in that script these lines:

author:
  - name: Frank Harrell<br><small>`@f2harrell`<small>

The last <small> should have been </small>. Thanks so much for putting me on to what to search for. Everything works now.

[dragonstyle]

Great to hear its back working and glad to help. I wish we could help catch errors like this but I can't really think of a good way for us to detect input that results in a malformed DOM (I think others are going to run into this and its really annoying to track down since there is no clear error or warning!). I'll keep thinking on it...

[harrelfe]

Thanks. If you find a good html integrity checker that we can create a bash script to run on all html files in a directory that might help us.