# I've had a rethink about post titles and the RSS feed in relation to Status posts. As they have no title by design I automatically change it to the date/time so that I can easily distinguish between them on the WordPress backend.
When I moved from a dedicated feed template (for microblog posts) to using the main feed for everything I elected to keep status post titles because a number of feed readers don’t handle title-less posts very well and re-use part of the content as a title - Feedly I’m looking at you!
Micro.blog ignores a date/time title so I never had any problem there but testing Brent Simmons’ Evergreen, however, reminded me that RSS readers should properly support the RSS spec and an item title just isn’t a required element.
As such, I have added my original code idea to functions.php to remove the title for status posts from the RSS feed:
// remove title for status posts from RSS feed
function remove_status_title_rss ($title) {
$post_format=get_post_format();
if ($post_format == "status") {
$title="";
}
return $title;
}
add_filter( 'the_title_rss', 'remove_status_title_rss');Comments
A New Year's Eve retrospective
2017 has been a mixed bag.
I've had this extended period of illness with which to contend. It was difficult at times and left me feeling pretty low but, thankfully, now seems to be coming to an end.
Still, every cloud has a silver lining and being off has given me extra time with my family that I would not otherwise have had. I also had the opportunity to take the philosophy course and reignite that passion which I would likely not have done had I been at work.
The first half of the year seemed to drift by fairly aimlessly. Yes, I did a lot of work on the blog and established how I wanted it to operate but that's a relatively small thing.
Later, as the months went by and certain ideas started to cement themselves in my mind, I knew I needed more.
While I try not to use Facebook anyway, and haven't tweeted in over a year now, the sentiment that drives this has grown stronger and become more than just a dislike; it has truly fleshed out. It may be part of a larger trend on the web but I personally better understand the why rather then the what.
My why and not someone else's.
This, combined with rekindling my childhood love of pen and paper, has solidified the notion that I need to create something bigger, better than just run-of-the-mill blog posts. I'm not sure exactly what but I just know that I must.
I understand on a deeper level that time is precious and I should make the most of it that I can. And this is absolutely what I plan to do - whether at home, on my commute, or wherever.
I don't yet know what shape it will take, exactly, but I think 2018 could be an interesting year.
Manton Reece has published “Setting up WordPress” to the micro.blog help pages to provide an extended introduction on using the CMS for microblogging. As microblog posts don’t have titles (just like tweets) he advises to leave them blank and “if necessary update the post template to not include the title in HTML or the RSS feed.” As I’ve outlined elsewhere, I personally don’t like having multiple posts listed as “(no title)” as it makes them difficult to manage in wp-admin.
This is why I decided to automatically replace blank titles with the date/time on posting. As well as being an obvious choice (posts are easily identifiable) micro.blog ignores titles in this format meaning they display correctly. This is fine for micro.blog but what if you want the rest of the world to see no title? This is where you have to update things to not include the title as I did with the RSS feed and have now also done with my JSON Feed (I completely forgot I had it setup) by editing the plugin to check for post formats in the same way as for RSS. It may seem like a lot of aggravation adding the title only to remove it again elsewhere but that’s just the way I wanted it set up. Others have used my solution due to issues such as WordPress automatically inserting the post ID as the title even if it has been left blank. But, as Manton points out:
An item title isn’t listed as a requirement in the RSS spec but most feed readers treat it as such leading to ugly displays. Feedly uses the beginning of the post content which looks particularly awful so, at the end of last year, I submitted this suggestion to their uservoice forum to properly support title-less items. If there are any Feedly users out there I’d appreciate if you could head on over and vote for this suggestion (it does require you to sign in.) The more votes it receives the more likely they are to consider it for future updates.