Earlier this year, while at CppNow, I completely broke the RSS feed for this blog. Really sorry about that, and thanks to Jonathan for pointing it out. However, I have been distracted with work, life, and a bunch of complications over the intervening months and have only now managed to fix it. I hope? Let’s hope.
As is all-too-common, the fix was easy once I understood how to fix it and understood the surprising constraints on how to add that fix to the blog infrastructure.
Excessive details about this mystery…
Some context on the blog’s infrastructure: I’m using the Hugo static site generator to build the site, and doing so with both a blog theme and a presentation theme. The blog theme is the main one you’re probably reading right now, and is based on the PaperMod theme. The presentation theme is actually the main reason I’m using Hugo – reveal-hugo, which unsurprisingly combines Hugo’s static site generation with Reveal.js slides. As a side note, reveal-hugo is amazing! =D
Now, the problem is that the slides section of this static site was still traversed by the blog theme, even though it had a custom output format to create the Reveal.js-powered slides instead of rendering as part of the blog. When the slides were traversed, it included each of the “pages” there into the generated RSS feed. And because of how reveal-hugo works, each section of each presentation looked like a “page”, creating a huge number of very strangely formatted blog “posts” in the RSS feed.
Sadly, Hugo doesn’t have any way to filter the pages used for a particular output format – everything gets sent to the RSS template if you enable that output centrally. This is also why the slides have to manually enable the Reveal.js output on each page. There was a bug requesting this, but it sat without update for a year until their bot marked it stale. =[
Luckily for me, just after the bug was marked stale, the original person who filed the bug posted that they had worked around this by customizing their RSS template to do the filtering within the RSS template itself. They helpfully provided a link to their code doing this filtering which helped me understand how to fix the issue. The Hugo folks confirmed (finally) that in fact this is the preferred way to handle things.
But in another sad realization, Hugo also makes it somewhat awkward to edit
templates beyond setting explicit variables or filling in extension points that
the template provides. They are loaded as Go modules into the Hugo system, and
so have to either be their own repository or be located at a specific path.
Because the template is someone else’s work, I wanted it to live alongside the
other third_party code in my blog’s repository which doesn’t play nicely with
the expected path. The Hugo module system provides a mount feature
that seemed like it might provide the path re-mapping needed, but it turns out
to be unable to redirect paths for finding modules in the first place. =[
I ended up needing to fork the theme into the repository, use a symlink to stitch it into the correct location, and then apply the fixes to the theme to work around the Hugo limitation. Of course, once all was said and done it seemed quite easy. But getting to the point where it was easy… well, wasn’t easy for me. ;]
Anyways, hopefully it is now fixed. I’m going to try to start posting again regularly. Just wanted to share this update to let folks know, leave some documentation of what all went into fixing this, and also to find out if there are any other issues that need fixing. Happy to have issues or even PRs fixing things here: https://github.com/chandlerc/blog