Does the RSS feed include the categories?

[bryanhanson]

It looks like it does not. This is (really) important for instance in promoting one's blog on R-Bloggers, which screens the RSS feed for [R] tags.

[dragonstyle]

Our current default feeds should include category metadata within them (not 100% if this is what you're asking though). (For example, our own Quarto blog uses categories minimally, but they each appear in the RSS feed as well as on the blog page and individual post). Do you have an example of them not appearing in a feed? If so, happy to take a look as they most certainly should!

You may be asking about category specific feeds (e.g. a feed created only for posts tagged [R]. If you're asking about this, right now it looks like we don't allow you to create these (though actually we done all the work with the exception of validation and documentation). I'm going to address at least the validation right now (here 47cf88e) - a fresh release is building now. If you'd like to generate category feeds, you can do so as:

feed:
  categories:
    - categeory1
    - category2

Which should result in feeds being created alongside your default feed with names like index_category1.xml, etc...

Let us know if this works for you!

[mark-edney]

Could you say more about what that bug is? There is a way to make category feeds but I'm afk right now- I'll report more later today!

If you use R as a category from an index.qmd, you will create two files:
index.feed-full-staged
index-r.feed-full-staged
They seem to be intermediary files as they have the titles and descriptions references but not their actual values.
If I had to guess, I would say -r is a command line parameter that causes an issue.

[dragonstyle]

You can enable listing feeds for categories like (abbreviated, not complete):

listing:
  feed:
    categories: [news, code, r]

I did this with a category named r and that didn't cause any issue (it would be surprising if there were magic names like this). Are there errors you can see when you render? The remaining staging files make it seem as though the render is failing part way through (perhaps we are attempting to read the descriptions out of files and one of the files of r category is causing us a problem).

[mark-edney]

You are correct, I had a post that was having an issue when the site was rendered.
The post itself could be rendered, but rendering the entire site wouldn't complete or raise any error.

The problem was with loading a dataset, as the following:
data(CO2)

which was corrected with:
force(data(CO2)

[dragonstyle]

Ok that is great though interesting that site rendering failed silently (and not good). Were you rendering using the terminal or rstudio?

[mark-edney]

I was rendering in RStudio.
The post also used the stargazer package, so I don't actually know if it was an issue with loading the data or with stargazer.
I decided that it was no longer worth the effort, so I removed the post and haven't had an issue since.

[bryanhanson]

Thank you! I was asking about the default feed. Mine is here and I don't see any category data in the formatted text or the xml, but perhaps I missed it. Main repo is here. I think _quarto.yml is configured properly, but maybe not.

The topic-specific feed is even better, I will investigate that too!

[jjallaire]

@dragonstyle I think what @bryanhanson is saying is that the RSS items don't have category metadata on them.

[dragonstyle]

Can you share the qmds (or repo) by any chance? I'm seeing category data in our quarto feed and in local testing so need to figure out what is accounting for the difference!

[bryanhanson]

https://github.com/bryanhanson/CSR The appearance of the blog is pretty much as expected. Thanks for looking into this.

[dragonstyle]

I do see category data in the RSS feed for each item (sample item with contents clipped for readability):

<item>
<title>Metabolic Phenotyping Protocol Part 2</title>
<link>http://chemospec.org/posts/2022-03-24-Protocol-Pt2/2022-03-24-Protocol-Pt2.html</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[ <p>Part 1 of this series is <a href="https://chemospec.org/posts/2022-02-01-Protocol-Pt1/">here</a>.</p> ]]>
</description>
<category>R</category>
<category>ChemoSpec</category>
<category>Metabolomics</category>
<guid>http://chemospec.org/posts/2022-03-24-Protocol-Pt2/2022-03-24-Protocol-Pt2.html</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 24 Mar 2022 07:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
</item>

It can be a little hard to pick out since the feed is carrying the HTML content, but they appear to be there and the feed appears to validate correctly. Are you seeing other behavior that is making you think the categories aren't present? I see them on the various pages as well so I'm thinking that all is working as expected. Really cool blog, too!

[bryanhanson]

Alright, looks like I some how overlooked that (maybe I can't spell when doing a "find"). Thanks for the positive feedback!

[bryanhanson]

Really really appreciate you all fine-tuning quarto in near real time!