I just improved this blog’s RSS feed:

  1. The feed now show the full content of each blog post. Previously, the RSS feed just showed the first paragraph of each blog post, which is the default in HUGO, but I didn’t notice at first. I’m really annoyed that this is the default, as it seems an anti-pattern to me. Everybody should be able to read the entire blog from RSS if they wish so. Of course I wouldn’t want that if I were interested in monetizing my blog or gathering user data. I fixed that easily by changing {{ .Summary | html }} to {{ .Content | html }} in my rss.xml, as I learned in: Who Goes Blogging 6: Three Steps to Improve Hugo’s RSS Feeds by Joseph D. Heyburn.

  2. The feed on the home page now only shows blog posts and doesn’t have entries for other sections like About or for static pages hosted on this blog. I learned how to filter the RSS feed on Tips for Customizing Hugo RSS Feeds by Ben Congdon.

In the future I might consider adding an Atom feed. From what I read it is a more sensible standard, and most feed readers support both anyway, but configuring it requires some extra steps in Hugo, e.g. using the hugo-atom-feed theme component and duplicating the configuration which pages to show in the feed etc. and even if I find a way to unify this configuration, it’s just more work and I’m not sure yet if that’s worth it.