RSS feed not respecting Excerpts (more tag)

[joelclermont]

When I use the Excerpt <!-- more --> plugin, I would expect that this also be honored by the RSS feed generator. Only the excerpt should appear in the feed, along with a link to click through and read the whole article.

This appears to be Jekyll behavior, so maybe I should open the issue over there. One cheap trick I had in mind was to have a post-generate task alter the atom.xml file to strip out content after the <!-- more --> tag for each article.

I am open to suggestions and I'm willing to work on this issue if you think it's useful to Octopress (or Jekyll) users in general.

[parkr]

I wouldn't do post-processing via a generator. I think this makes sense, yeah.

[joelclermont]

So if we don't do the post-processing hack, is this an issue I should work upstream in Jekyll? Or if there's a place to override RSS behavior in Octopress, can you point me at the right source files? Thanks again.

[parkr]

What we might actually do is use the new excerpt attribute of posts in Jekyll 1.0.0.beta2.

Think that'd satisfy these needs?

[joelclermont]

Yes, if that functionality applies to the RSS feed, that would suit my needs perfectly.

[parkr]

Yeah! You can use post.excerpt in your liquid I think!

[joelclermont]

That would be great. Anything I can do to help with development? It looks like you are already working on migrating to Jekyll 1.0.

[parkr]

My Jekyll1.0 code is good to go. I'll merge and you can work off the new 2.1 branch :-) Thanks!

[parkr]

Just kidding - I already merged #1124 :-)

[joelclermont]

Sweet, I'll grab that branch and try the post.excerpt functionality in RSS. I'll report back shortly. Thanks.

[parkr]

It's all merged into the 2.1 branch so you should be good to go!

[joelclermont]

I just pulled the 2.1 branch and tried using post.excerpt instead of post.content inside the source/atom.xml file. When I generate, I get the following error:

Liquid Exception: undefined method `gsub' for nil:NilClass in atom.xml
/vagrant/plugins/octopress_filters.rb:81:in `expand_urls'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/context.rb:58:in `invoke'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/variable.rb:43:in `block in render'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/variable.rb:38:in `each'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/variable.rb:38:in `inject'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/variable.rb:38:in `render'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/block.rb:94:in `block in render_all'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/block.rb:92:in `collect'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/block.rb:92:in `render_all'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/tags/for.rb:116:in `block (2 levels) in render'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/tags/for.rb:104:in `each'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/tags/for.rb:104:in `each_with_index'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/tags/for.rb:104:in `block in render'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/context.rb:91:in `stack'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/tags/for.rb:103:in `render'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/block.rb:94:in `block in render_all'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/block.rb:92:in `collect'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/block.rb:92:in `render_all'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/block.rb:82:in `render'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/template.rb:124:in `render'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/liquid-2.3.0/lib/liquid/template.rb:132:in `render!'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/jekyll-0.12.0/lib/jekyll/convertible.rb:79:in `do_layout'
/vagrant/plugins/post_filters.rb:167:in `do_layout'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/jekyll-0.12.0/lib/jekyll/page.rb:100:in `render'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/jekyll-0.12.0/lib/jekyll/site.rb:204:in `block in render'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/jekyll-0.12.0/lib/jekyll/site.rb:203:in `each'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/jekyll-0.12.0/lib/jekyll/site.rb:203:in `render'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/jekyll-0.12.0/lib/jekyll/site.rb:41:in `process'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/jekyll-0.12.0/bin/jekyll:264:in `<top (required)>'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/bin/jekyll:19:in `load'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/bin/jekyll:19:in `<main>'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392@global/bin/ruby_noexec_wrapper:14:in `eval'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392@global/bin/ruby_noexec_wrapper:14:in `<main>'
Build Failed

I take this to mean that post.excerpt returned nil which caused the chained filter to fail. Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

[joelclermont]

Just stumbled on a low tech solution: post.content | split: '<!-- more -->' | first

It's similar to the post processing hack I had in mind, but it does it within the filter using a very simple split and first filter. This would even work on Octopress 2.0 and doesn't require anything new in Jekyll. Thoughts? post.excerpt would be cleaner, but is there a downside to this?

[parkr]

Let's do post.excerpt. You can set the excerpt_separator in the configs I think.

[mattheyan]

Does anyone know the status of this issue, besides the fact that its still open? I see that the atom template still uses 'content'.

A while back I modified the source to use excerpt and everything seemed to work just fine on my blog, the feed is no longer broken due to invalid syntax in post content.

I can fork and submit a pull request if the intention is still to use excerpt. I do wonder though, if an excerpt isn't defined, would it be blank? Is there a way to use the content property instead in that case? I apologize but I definitely have a limited understanding of these technologies.