RSS feeds by default in blog project template

[alastairrushworth]

I'm not sure if this issue belongs here or in a different repo - please let me know and I'll open another if needed!

As I understand from the docs https://quarto.org/docs/websites/website-blog.html#rss-feed, RSS feeds need to be explicitly enabled by the user by adding two pieces of info to their site. I'd like to suggest that these are added as a default, perhaps with some guidance on how to remove or edit them in the docs. I think this is typical with other blog publishing suites.

I raise this because I've observed a very large number of quarto blogs in the wild that don't have feeds and I suspect (though of course can't be sure) that this is simply the persistence of default settings and that it's not clear that feeds need to be enabled.

Thanks :)

[mcanouil]

FWIW, I'd rather have opt-in features than opt-out ones.

The RSS feature is documented in the "created a blog": https://quarto.org/docs/websites/website-blog.html

I believe that is enough for users to be aware of RSS and to choose or not to use it.

[alastairrushworth]

Both ghost and wordpress (for example) make it opt-out. I didn't look much further than these, but I suspect most blogging software does provide RSS as a default.

• ghost
• wordpress

Of course, just because others do, doesn't mean Quarto should - opt-in is completely fine.

What I'd say in that case is that for such an important feature that is so intrinsic to how blogs work (allowing syndication), is that it could be made much more prominent in the setup process what an RSS feed is and that it is opt-in. It seems as though at the moment, a Quarto user could easily miss it altogether. I suspect many more users would enable it if it was made clearer that they have to opt-in.

[gadenbuie]

IMHO RSS feeds are kind of a baseline, table-stakes feature for blogs. I can understand not turning on RSS feeds for all website types, since websites are often used for courses, workshops, etc. But the quarto create blog command could (and I'd argue should) enable feeds by default.

[mcanouil]

I believe this to be better than setting RSS for everything.

[alastairrushworth]

100%, and i realise it wasn't all that clear in the original message but my issue was intended to pertain only to blogs. So I think this solution would cover it, thanks!

[mcanouil]

@alastairrushworth Maybe you could edit the title then with something like "RSS feeds by default in blog project template".