Things I Have Written

Using Hugo content sections for RSS feed flexibility

I’ve done a lot of testing with Hugo’s RSS feed generation in the past week, and one fact stands out: you can fight the law, but the law always wins.

In Hugo’s case, the law is content sections. Content sections are the key to RSS flexibility.

You may remember me expressing some bitterness about the way Hugo’s default is to litter the place about with RSS feeds for every single type of taxonomy that you have enabled. Having an RSS feed for every tag is silly, and so I figured I would just disable that. Turns out, it’s not so simple.

As I discovered last week, there’s a lack of granularity for enabling and disabling RSS feeds beyond sections, taxonomies, and taxonomy terms. That sounds great, until you realize I’m not talking about specific sections, taxonomies, and taxonomy terms. I mean all sections, or all taxonomies, or all taxonomy terms. Hugo RSS …

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Hugo Feed Link

Yesterday I wrote about how to customize your Hugo RSS feed so that you have one feed named feed.xml. One other addition you may wish to make is to link to it in your page headers.

It’s simple enough – assuming you’ve made the modifications to make Hugo name your RSS feed “feed.xml”, add the following to your base template somewhere between the <head></head> tags. Obviously there will be a lot more in your page header, but this is simplified for our purposes.

<head>
    
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href='{{ "feed.xml" | absURL }}' />
    
</head>

Now when you view your page source, you’ll see a link to your RSS feed embedded within.

Hugo page header RSS link

By the way, in case you’re wondering how I did a view source on iPadOS, the answer is a View Source shortcut, which can be found here.

Customizing Hugo RSS Feeds

Yesterday I griped about the way Hugo generates RSS feeds for every section and taxonomy, and how it names them all index.xml. Then, not long after I posted my complaints, I found all the answers I’d been seeking.

First, the default RSS handling in Hugo is weird. Anyone who thinks it’s how RSS should work on a website is … well, let’s just use the word wrong and smile in a friendly manner while we do. But it’s wrong.

The good news is, both of my desired changes, having one RSS feed for my blog posts only and having that feed named feed.xml, are quite simple to achieve. All that’s needed are some minor additions to the site config file and an RSS template.

The list of steps to perform are as follows:

  • Configure the site to have one single RSS feed in the site’s root directory.
  • Configure …

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Hugo RSS Feeds

One thing about Hugo that I’m not in love with so far is its default RSS feed handling, which admittedly I most likely don’t fully understand. What I want from my site is specific feeds for specific things, and nothing more. That might sound controlling, but it’s not about that so much as it’s about clarity and organization.

For example, Hugo by default makes an RSS feed for all new content on the site. That means if I create a Contact page or an About page or a Projects page, it gets added into my RSS feed, which seems really stupid it me. Generally people want RSS to follow blog posts or specific topics. That’s what I want too.

In addition to this overall, way too comprehensive feed, Hugo loves to create feeds for every item in every taxonomy type. I don’t want to be rude to whoever decided this was a great idea, but does it really seem likely that anyone wants to follow an RSS feed for tags used in blog posts? …

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Panic Code Editor

I have a few apps on my iPad I consider workhorses, and certainly one of those is Code Editor from Panic.

Code Editor is kind of a 3-in-1 tool for working on websites:

  • SSH client,
  • FTP client,
  • Text editor.

This is the perfect set of features for me for working with Hugo sites because I need to move files around (FTP), edit files (text editor), and compile the site to see my changes (SSH client).

Furthermore, I often use each of these features individually to do some quick task. The FTP functionality alone is pretty valuable ever since Panic discontinued their Transmit FTP app on iOS.

Code Editor is not perfect, however. I’m not going to say I’m hesitant to recommend it, because I’m not, but there are a couple caveats.

First, it’s not a new app and it will eventually be replaced by a new Panic product called Nova. Right …

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