RSS feeds pulling Title vs. Body (esp. for WordPress)

[chrisaldrich]

I've seen this pop up a few times in Slack (one is copied below) but it seems to be a common request of many, and I'm sure will be an ongoing UI concern, so I'ml memorializing it here so you can potentially address it in the future as time allows.

Many, it seems, would like to have micro.blog pull in the the body [the_content()] of WordPress (and possibly other platforms) posts rather than the title. I suspect you could relatively easily parse the RSS feed to allow this to happen? (Doing it with h-entry feeds is even easier as I recall Aaron Parecki mentioning somewhere too.)

Most seem to be requesting this as their habit is to use WordPress' Status/Aside Format for microblogging and WordPress (or their theme) just strips off the title. For admin UI purposes, many prefer to have some type of descriptive title (other than the current date/time hack) to better manage their content.

Naturally this brings up the question of what to do with other post types (like traditional articles). This could be handled the same way by just excerpting the first ~280 characters and needing to click on either a link to the full post or the timestamp with the permalink URL to continue reading.

Another alternate is to specify when importing RSS feeds whether or not they're status update type feeds or article feeds and then process them accordingly.

I think that most platforms (including WordPress both hosted/self-hosted) allow one to build custom RSS feeds to allow this. [See also http://boffosocko.com/2016/12/18/rss-feeds-a-follow-up-on-my-indieweb-commitment-2017/ for a more advanced example of how I'm handling it.]

---- Exemplar from Slack on 4/28/17: erunyon [10:10 AM] @manton So I know you don’t include titles in your feed, and I’ve seen others not adding them, but for my site I like having them as part of the data, even though I don’t know them. However, I’ve noticed that micro.blog is using the titles of my “snippet” posts rather than the description. Any way to control this? For reference, here’s my micro.blog url http://micro.blog/erunyon and the xml that’s feeding it https://erikrunyon.com/snippets.xml “even though I don’t show them”

colinwalker [10:13 AM] @erunyon if there is a title Micro.blog thinks it's a normal post (rather than a micropost) and posts a link. No title is preferred but it will also recognise the date as a "blank" title for these purposes and ignore it.

erunyon [10:19 AM] @colinwalker So instead of text (the title), insert the pubdate as the “title”? Or remove title completely I suppose.

colinwalker [10:19 AM] Yeah, that's about it I created a custom feed and removed the title field

erunyon [10:22 AM] Alright, thanks. @manton, no rush, but the ability to designate which field from the feed should be displayed would be nice. I’ll adjust my feed for now. I’ll create a micro.blog specific feed for now.

[glueckpress]

@chrisaldrich This plugin offers a straight-forward way around the title issue: https://github.com/glueckpress/micro.blog

It does not provide smart truncation (yet), or anything more sophisticated, but I’m open to anything.

[manton]

@glueckpress Thanks for sharing that!

[manton]

This is all good feedback, thanks @chrisaldrich. One recent improvement: Micro.blog is now smarter about noticing if a post only includes a title and photo and it will treat those as microblog posts.