Better WordPress RSS Feeds

I’ve made a handful of tweaks to my RSS feed which I feel improves upon WordPress’s default implementation, at least in my use-case.1 In case any of these improvements help you, too, here’s a list of them:

Post Kinds in Titles

Since 2020, I’ve decorated post titles by prefixing them with the “kind” of post they are (courtesy of the Post Kinds plugin). I’ve already written about how I do it, if you’re interested.

Screenshot showing a Weekly Digest email from DanQ.me, with two Notes and a Repost clearly-identified.
Identifying post kinds is particularly useful for people who subscribe by email (the emails are generated off the RSS feed either daily or weekly: subscriber’s choice), who might want to see articles and videos but not care about for example checkins and reposts.

RSS Only posts

A minority of my posts are – initially, at least – publicised only via my RSS feed (and places that are directly fed by it, like email subscribers). I use a tag to identify posts to be hidden in this way. I’ve written about my implementation before, but I’ve since made a couple of additional improvements:

  1. Suppressing the tag from tag clouds, to make it harder to accidentally discover these posts by tag-surfing,
  2. Tweaking the title of such posts when they appear in feeds (using the same technique as above), so that readers know when they’re seeing “exclusive” content, and
  3. Setting a X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow HTTP header when viewing such tag or a post, to discourage search engines (code for this not shown below because it’s so very specific to my theme that it’s probably no use to anybody else!).
// 1. Suppress the "rss club" tag from tag clouds/the full tag list
function rss_club_suppress_tags_from_display( string $tag_list, string $before, string $sep, string $after, int $post_id ): string {
  foreach(['rss-club'] as $tag_to_suppress){
    $regex = sprintf( '/<li>[^<]*?<a [^>]*?href="[^"]*?\/%s\/"[^>]*?>.*?<\/a>[^<]*?<\/li>/', $tag_to_suppress );
    $tag_list = preg_replace( $regex, '', $tag_list );
  }
  return $tag_list;
}
add_filter( 'the_tags', 'rss_club_suppress_tags_from_display', 10, 5 );

// 2. In feeds, tweak title if it's an RSS exclusive
function rss_club_add_rss_only_to_rss_post_title( $title ){
  $post_tag_slugs = array_map(function($tag){ return $tag->slug; }, wp_get_post_tags( get_the_ID() ));
  if ( ! in_array( 'rss-club', $post_tag_slugs ) ) return $title; // if we don't have an rss-club tag, drop out here
  return trim( "{$title} [RSS Exclusive!]" );
  return $title;
}
add_filter( 'the_title_rss', 'rss_club_add_rss_only_to_rss_post_title', 6 );

Adding a stylesheet

Adding a stylesheet to your feeds can make them much friendlier to beginner users (which helps drive adoption) without making them much less-convenient for people who know how to use feeds already. Darek Kay and Terence Eden both wrote great articles about this just earlier this year, but I think my implementation goes a step further.

Screenshot of DanQ.me's RSS feed as viewed in Firefox, showing a "Q" logo and three recent posts.
I started with Matt Webb‘s pretty-feed-v3.xsl by Matt Webb (as popularised by AboutFeeds.com) and built from there.

In addition to adding some “Q” branding, I made tweaks to make it work seamlessly with both my RSS and Atom feeds by using two <xsl:for-each> blocks and exploiting the fact that the two standards don’t overlap in their root namespaces. Here’s my full XSLT; you need to override your feed template as Terence describes to use it, but mine can be applied to both RSS and Atom.2

I’ve still got more I’d like to do with this, for example to take advantage of the thumbnail images I attach to posts. On which note…

Thumbnail images

When I first started offering email subscription options I used Mailchimp’s RSS-to-email service, which was… okay, but not great, and I didn’t like the privacy implications that came along with it. Mailchimp support adding thumbnails to your email template from your feed, but WordPress themes don’t by-default provide the appropriate metadata to allow them to do that. So I installed Jordy Meow‘s RSS Featured Image plugin which did it for me.

<item>
        <title>[Checkin] Geohashing expedition 2023-07-27 51 -1</title>
        <link>https://danq.me/2023/07/27/geohashing-expedition-2023-07-27-51-1/</link>

        ...

        <media:content url="/_q23u/2023/07/20230727_141710-1024x576.jpg" medium="image" />
        <media:description>Dan, wearing a grey Three Rings hoodie, carrying French Bulldog Demmy, standing on a path with trees in the background.</media:description>
</item>
Media attachments for RSS feeds are perhaps most-popular for podcasts, but they’re also great for post thumbnail images.

During my little redesign earlier this year I decided to go two steps further: (1) ditching the plugin and implementing the functionality directly into my theme (it’s really not very much code!), and (2) adding not only a <media:content medium="image" url="..." /> element but also a <media:description> providing the default alt-text for that image. I don’t know if any feed readers (correctly) handle this accessibility-improving feature, but my stylesheet above will, some day!

Here’s how that’s done:

function rss_insert_namespace_for_featured_image() {
  echo "xmlns:media=\"http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/\"\n";
}

function rss_insert_featured_image( $comments ) {
  global $post;
  $image_id = get_post_thumbnail_id( $post->ID );
  if( ! $image_id ) return;
  $image = get_the_post_thumbnail_url( $post->ID, 'large' );
  $image_url = esc_url( $image );
  $image_alt = esc_html( get_post_meta( $image_id, '_wp_attachment_image_alt', true ) );
  $image_title = esc_html( get_the_title( $image_id ) );
  $image_description = empty( $image_alt ) ? $image_title : $image_alt;
  if ( !empty( $image ) ) {
    echo <<<EOF
      <media:content url="{$image_url}" medium="image" />
      <media:description>{$image_description}</media:description>
    EOF;
  }
}

add_action( 'rss2_ns', 'rss_insert_namespace_for_featured_image' );
add_action( 'rss2_item', 'rss_insert_featured_image' );

So there we have it: a little digital gardening, and four improvements to WordPress’s default feeds.

RSS may not be as hip as it once was, but little improvements can help new users find their way into this (enlightened?) way to consume the Web.

If you’re using RSS to follow my blog, great! If it’s not for you, perhaps pick your favourite alternative way to get updates, from options including email, Telegram, the Fediverse (e.g. Mastodon), and more…

Footnotes

1 The changes apply to the Atom feed too, for anybody of such an inclination. Just assume that if I say RSS I’m including Atom, okay?

2 The experience of writing this transformation/stylesheet also gave me yet another opportunity to remember how much I hate working with XSLTs. This time around, in addition to the normal namespace issues and headscratching syntax, I had to deal with the fact that I initially tried to use a feature from XSLT version 2.0 (a 22-year-old version) only to discover that all major web browsers still only support version 1.0 (specified last millenium)!

Screenshot showing a Weekly Digest email from DanQ.me, with two Notes and a Repost clearly-identified.× Screenshot of DanQ.me's RSS feed as viewed in Firefox, showing a "Q" logo and three recent posts.×

Identifying Post Kinds in WordPress RSS Feeds

I use the Post Kinds plugin to streamline the management of the different types of posts I make on my blog, based on the IndieWeb post types list: articles, like this one, are “conventional” blog posts, but I also publish notes (which are analogous to “tweets”), reposts (“shares” of things I’ve found online, sometimes with commentary), checkins (mostly chronicling my geocaching/geohashing), and others: I’ve extended Post Kinds to facilitate comics and reviews, for example.

But for people who subscribe (either directly or indirectly) to everything I post, I imagine it must be a little frustrating to sometimes be unable to identify the type of a post before clicking-through. So I’ve added the following code, which I’m sharing here and on GitHub in case it’s of any use to anybody else, to my theme’s functions.php:

// Make titles in RSS feed be prefixed by the Kind of the post.
function add_kind_to_rss_post_title(){
        $kinds = wp_get_post_terms( get_the_ID(), 'kind' );
        if( ! isset( $kinds ) || empty( $kinds ) ) return get_the_title(); // sanity-check.
        $kind = $kinds[0]->name;
        $title = get_the_title();
        return trim( "[{$kind}] {$title}" );
}
add_filter( 'the_title_rss', 'add_kind_to_rss_post_title', 4 ); // priority 4 to ensure it happens BEFORE default escaping filters.

This decorates the titles of my posts, but only in my feeds, so it’s easier for people to tell at-a-glance what’s going on:

Rendered RSS feed showing Post Kinds prefixes

Down the line I might expand this so that it doesn’t show if the subscriber is, for example, asking only for articles (e.g. via this feed); I’m coming up with a huge list of things I’d like to do at IndieWebCamp London! But for now, this feels like a nice simple improvement to a plugin I love that helps it to fit my specific needs.

Rendered RSS feed showing Post Kinds prefixes×

Writing A Calendar App In Rails Vs. PHP

Some time ago, I wrote a web-based calendar application in PHP, one of my favourite programming languages. This tool would produce a HTML tabular calendar for a four week period, Monday to Sunday, in which the current date (or a user-specified date) fell in the second week (so you’re looking at this week, last week, and two weeks in the future). The user-specified date, for various reasons, would be provided as the number of seconds since the epoch (1970). In addition, the user must be able to flick forwards and backwards through the calendar, “shifting” by one or four weeks each time.

Part of this algorithm, of course, was responsible for finding the timestamp (seconds since the epoch) of the beginning of “a week last Monday”, GMT. It went something like this (pseudocode):

1. Get a handle on the beginning of "today" with [specified time] modulus [number of seconds in day]
2. Go back in time a week by deducting [number of seconds in day] multiplied by [number of days in week] (you can see I'm a real programmer, because I set "number of days in week" as a constant, in case it ever gets changed)
3. Find the previous Monday by determining what day of the week this date is on (clever functions in PHP do this for me), then take [number of seconds in day] multiplied by [number of days after Monday we are] from this to get "a week last Monday"
4. Jump forwards or backwards a number of weeks specified by the user, if necessary. Easy.
5. Of course, this isn't perfect, because this "shift backwards a week and a few days" might have put us in to "last month", in which case the calendar needs to know to deduct one month and add [number of days in last month]
6. And if we just went "back in time" beyond January, we also need to deduct a year and add 11 months. Joy.

So; not the nicest bit of code in the world.

I’ve recently been learning to program in Ruby On Rails. Ruby is a comparatively young language which has become quite popular in Japan but has only had reasonable amounts of Westernised documentation for the last four years or so. I started looking into it early this year after reading an article that compared it to Python. Rails is a web application development framework that sits on top of Ruby and promises to be “quick and structured”, becoming the “best of both worlds” between web engineering in PHP (quick and sloppy) and in Java (slow and structured). Ruby is a properly object-oriented language – even your literals are objects – and Rails takes full advantage of this.

For example, here’s my interpretation in Rails of the same bit of code as above:

@week_last_monday = 7.days.ago.gmtime.monday + params[:weeks].to_i.weeks

An explanation:

  • @week_last_monday is just a variable in which I’m keeping the result of my operation.
  • 7.days might fool you. Yes, what I’m doing there is instantiating an Integer (7, actually a Fixint, but who cares), then calling the “days” function on it, which returns me an instance of Time which represents 7 days of time.
  • Calling the ago method on my Time object, which returns me another Time object, this time one which is equal to Time.now (the time right now) minus the amount of Time I already had (7 days). Basically, I now have a handle on “7 days ago”.
  • The only thing PHP had up on me here is that it’s gmdate() function had ensured I already had my date/time in GMT; here, I have to explicitly call gmtime to do the same thing.
  • And then I simply call monday on my resulting Time object to get a handle on the beginning of the previous Monday. That simple. 24 characters of fun.
  • + params[:weeks].to_i.weeks simply increments (or decrements) the Time I have by a number of weeks specified by the user (params[:weeks] gets the number of weeks specified, to_i converts it to an integer, and weeks, like days, creates a Time object from this. In Ruby, object definitions can even override operators like +, -, <, >, etc., as if they were methods (because they are), and so the author of the Time class made it simple to perform arithmetic upon times and dates.

This was the very point at which I feel in love with Ruby on Rails.

PHP 5 RC1

Terribly geeky I know, but I find it awfully exciting: PHP 5 Release Candidate 1 was released today. PHP 5 can now be considered feature-complete, and mostly stable. If only the program I’m writing with it could be considered the same…

Makes You Feel Stupid

Don’t you feel really stupid when you plan to go via somewhere on the way to somewhere else, and completely forget about it. I managed that this morning: I’d put some keys in to get cut at the hardware shop around the corner from where I live, gone and bought my lunch from Somerfield, then returned home. When I went to work, past the shop, I forgot entirely to pick up the keys, until I got about a third of the way to the office and had to turn back. D’oh!

One of Claire’s birthday presents – being delivered by post – hasn’t arrived yet, and her birthday’s on Monday. Must remember to phone the company today and find out what’s happened to it. Can’t say what it is, here, ‘cos she reads this page, too.

Keep having to give my work colleague PHP tips so that he stands a chance of writing the website of Borth Surf Club. Looking at the web site so far, I can’t help but feel that it’s not PHP tips I should be giving him, but basic design pointers! Like not putting the title of the page as “Untitled Document”, for one. Here’s a chunk of code I just lifted out of the web site:

<p align="justify">&nbsp;</p>
<p align="justify">&nbsp;</p>
<p align="justify">&nbsp;</p>
<p align="justify">&nbsp;</p>
<p align="justify">&nbsp;</p>
<p align="justify">&nbsp;</p>
<p align="justify">&nbsp;</p>

For the non-techies out there, I’ll explain what this bit of code does. It prints seven empty paragraphs. Exciting, eh?

I’ll resist strangling him with my keyboard cable on account of the fact that I believe that there is some hope for him, yet. We’ll see.

Anyway, better get some work done…