Archive

@colinwalker Congrats on the activity success.

I’m guessing you know, but just in case not: the titles for your untitled posts come over as HTML fragments in feed readers. Certainly in ReadKit, but I just checked in Reeder on the Mac as well Oh, and in Fiery Feeds on iOS.

Doesn't matter mich in the grand scheme of things, but I know you've spent a lot of time on that kind of thing.

@colinwalker ??

@devilgate Thanks.

Yes, I know. It’s because they don’t properly support the RSS spec. Item titles are not a required element so they tend to duplicate a section of the content rather than presenting the posts without a title. It’s one of the reasons I switched to Feedbin.

@colinwalker I’m sure you're right about the spec, but it's only in your posts that I've seen that particular presentation (and yours didn't used to be like that). Dave, Brent, Manton -- even me! -- have titleless posts that don't fill the title field with HTML.

@devilgate Hmmm. Will have to check what WP is doing with the feed.

@colinwalker i am rapping with feedlly at the moment about title- less posts - is there a link to the RSS spec i can point them to - their support definitely doesn’t get it - and is escalating into dev !

@JohnPhilpin I raised it as an issue on their system a while back and heard nothing. You could point them to this and emphasise where it says “title and link may be omitted” in the “Elements of <item>” section.

@colinwalker thankyou - i notice that it says

and the link and title may be omitted. All elements of an item are optional, however at least one of title or description must be present.

so if we leave out title - we need a description - which I THINK is the excerpt / extract / synopsis ... which actually don’t have in micro-blog ... do we?

@devilgate I wonder if mine is where WordPress surrounds the content in a CDATA tag. I’ll have to try building a custom RSS template and see what’s happens. Although you could try this if you feel like testing.

@JohnPhilpin “An item may also be complete in itself, if so, the description contains the text ... and the link and title may be omitted” - it’s in the m.b feeds.

@colinwalker In Newsblur yours show up with the start of the post as the title. Mine show the post number that my theme allocates. They get to Mb ok, as I have that little bit of code to remove the title from the rss for status posts. Somehow Newsblur still receives it though.

@vanessa Looking at the source for your feed I see the title so don’t know if m.b is doing anything else to exclude it.

@colinwalker I don't know. I added the bit of code you gave me to remove titles from rss and it seemed to work for Microblog just fine, so I assumed it was working. Maybe just coincidence - I could have added it to the wrong file for all I know!! Weird.

@vanessa Hmm ?

@colinwalker I added that feed, but it doesn't show anything in the desktop clients -- presumably because it hasn't updated since August.

I was able to view the posts in Feedly's web app. The titles show as a subset of the post, with no HTML tags. But that's not surprising, because the browser would handle any it found.

I don't know whether that helps at all. Seems that the title element is getting populated when it shouldn't be. I noticed Manton linked today to how M.b handles titles. If it's a date or a number M.b ignores them. So maybe you need to go back to it being one of those, if it's not blank now.

@colinwalker Well, if you have to ponder, there's no hope for me!

@devilgate In that test feed there isn’t even a title element so Feedly is taking it from Description as expected. The difference was that I removed the CDATA wrapper so looks like it is that causing the tags to appear.

@colinwalker What @vanessa said ?

@JohnPhilpin @vanessa You give me too much credit. I make it up as I go along ?

@vanessa I think I’d need to check the code that you added. It’s in functions.php right?

@colinwalker so do I - but I can’t dance quick enough when somebody asks questions ....

@colinwalker It is, although there's two: wp-includes/functions.php and wp-content/themes/sempress/functions.php. I put it in the first one. This may not work, but this is what I have:

function removestatustitlerss ($title) { $postformat=getpostformat(); if ( $post_format == "status") { $title=""; } return $title; }

addfilter( 'thetitlerss', 'removestatustitlerss');

Of course, I'm clueless about php…

@vanessa Ah, it should be in the functions.php within the theme.

@colinwalker OK, yeah, it's Markdownified the underscores. Ho hum. Another thing I'm not much good at!

@colinwalker OK, cool, I'll try that then. I did wonder. Thanks. So remove it from the original place, just put it in the theme?

@vanessa It looks right though if I imagine the underscores in there ?

@colinwalker I'm sure it is, as you gave it to me in the first place! I will get round to picking some of this stuff up, in time. Baby steps - if it ain't C (or Pascal, for my sins), I don't understand it.

@vanessa I did two years of Pascal when I was at school, can’t remember a thing about it.

@colinwalker I don't know I could use it now, but I can understand it when I see it. I did try some C++ when I was doing a Software Engineering HNC at night classes, but still preferred C (this was in 98-2000, so some time ago now). I'm a musician really, not a techy :-)

@vanessa My Pascal was 86-87 - not even Turbo Pascal.

Many RSS readers use the description field in a feed as a surrogate when there is no title, displaying the first 'X' number of characters from the content. This is expected behaviour but they should really support title-less posts properly. (It's one of the reasons I moved to Feedbin.) It's been pointed out on a couple of occasions that various feed readers include HTML tags in the "title" for my title-less posts. The conversation yesterday lead me to discover that the way WordPress contains the item description in a CDATA wrapper is causing this. A test feed without the CDATA wrapper seems to work okay. So I need to find a way to modify the feed on the fly or create a custom template. I've had a look and don't think the former option is possible.