RSS feed is missing description/article content for posts

[nschonni]

URL:

https://nodejs.org/en/feed/blog.xml

Browser Name:

Firefox

Browser Version:

Operating System:

Windows 11

How to reproduce the issue:

The previous plugin would include the article. The current feed https://nodejs.org/en/feed/blog.xml just includes the title/link but no other content.
Similar to https://github.com/nodejs/node/releases.atom, it should contain the full post content

[ovflowd]

The problem is that including the full content of the article is quite problematic. First, because the original plugin wouldn't parse the markdown (if I recall correctly?)

I think we can update the current plugin to also add the parsed content of each blog post, I think.

[ovflowd]

Anyhow, thanks for reporting, @nschonni :)

[ovflowd]

@azu if you feel into tackling this PR, the place where we have the logic is done here https://github.com/nodejs/nodejs.org/blob/main/scripts/next-data/generatePreBuildFiles.mjs#L46

You can debug console.log(post) to see what comes out of it (pretty sure the body should be there).

And the documentation to the feed package is here: https://github.com/jpmonette/feed, you might simply need to add a content field on each item :)

[ovflowd]

Update: I've suggested Nextra implement buil-tin RSS support. Let's see what they say.

[kkkrist]

Some time during the last ca. 24h the whole blog feed (and the other two advertised feeds) went missing (404).

• https://nodejs.org/en/feed/blog.xml
• https://nodejs.org/en/feed/releases.xml
• https://nodejs.org/en/feed/vulnerability.xml

Could you please take a look?

[ovflowd]

Hey @kkkrist indeed that sounds like a bug. Yesterday we changed the approach of generating the RSS feeds during pre-build towards Next.js's App Router Dynamic Routes (https://github.com/nodejs/nodejs.org/blob/main/app/en/feed/%5Bfeed%5D/route.ts)

I think the solution here would be to find a way to tell Next.js to build these on static exports.

[ovflowd]

cc #5458 fixes #5456 and @kkkrist comment.

[Harkunwar]

@ovflowd If we want to restore the original functionality and include the post content as well, we would need to be mindful of the RSS feed size. Currently our RSS feed contains all the previous posts, however most RSS feeds that do include content, limit their feed to some number, usually around 10.

[ovflowd]

@ovflowd If we want to restore the original functionality and include the post content as well, we would need to be mindful of the RSS feed size. Currently our RSS feed contains all the previous posts, however most RSS feeds that do include content, limit their feed to some number, usually around 10.

Well, I guess we can definitely open another issue to investigate what our RSS feed should have or not, how many blog posts it should have, etc.

For the content, it would blow up the RSS feed if we added the content for every single post.

We would need to revise these aspects, as we would need to change the Serverless Function that generates feeds if we want to include their contents.

We would also need to be able to extract X paragraphs and append a "Read more" button. All of that sounds a little bit overkill.

I'm strongly leaning towards not implementing this as I'm not sure how worth it is, and so far no one has been complaining about missing "description" for the RSS feeds.

What do y'all think @nodejs/website

[nschonni]

The built-in release feed contains the information except the download links that were only available on the website feed. If @nodejs/releasers wants to modify the process for the release posts to include the missing information it would add back part of the missing functionality.

I don't think ignoring breaking core parts of the open web like RSS is a great approach though.