weblog.lol/RSS and title-less posts

[bixfrankonis]

Wondering if I can stir up some discussion about something Dave Winer talked about regarding RSS feed readers and titles, but in the context of weblog.lol, which currently only has titled posts; you basically can’t make an untitled post without causing problems in the {recent-posts} area.

(Or at least last time I accidentally made an untitled post, it just autocreated a title Untitled to put there.)

The first thing I wanted to note is that right now RSS feed items display a post title twice: once in the <title> element and again in the body if you’re generating title from a header in the post body. This is easy for a user to change because you can just always use Title: in the front matter and not use a header in the body. (As long as you remember to use a {post-title} tag in your template, above the {body} tag.) In this case the RSS items should just have a title in the <title> element.

But I’m wondering if there’s a way to have titleless posts on weblog.lol, given that {recent-posts} or any other eventual list of posts will need something to display. For example, if there isn’t a specified title, maybe a quasi-post-title is generated using X words from the post body (ending with an ellipsis) that is only used for things like {recent-posts} or in the HTML <title> but not in feeds since they are not real titles?

Anyway, thoughts?

[bixfrankonis]

Basically, something like this:

If Title: in front matter, generate {post-title} from Title:.
If no Title: in front matter, but post body starts with a #, generate {post-title} from #.
If no Title: in front matter and post body doesn't start with a #, generate {quasi-post-title} from start of post body.
If {quasi-post-title} exists, don't populate <title> element in RSS item.

[newbold]

I’ve been following Dave’s recent stuff about title-less posts with a lot of interest, and yeah, I need to untangle the whole situation with titles in weblog.lol. I really appreciate the thought you’ve put into the approach here, which seems solid to me. I’ll work on it soon!

[newbold]

I think I’ve finally implemented this fully. There’s a new configuration item, Titleless title length, with a default value of of 80 characters. If you don’t have a title in your post, weblog.lol will attempt to make a title out of your content as nicely and cleanly as possible (using the first full sentence of your post if it’s less than the Titleless title length; otherwise it’ll just slice things neatly at the closest point around Titleless title length, careful to avoid chopping a word in half or anything like that).

In the feeds, titleless posts now omit the <title> element entirely. I’ve tested the feed changes using Dave Winer’s excellent demo app and it appears to do exactly what it should be doing:

Let me know if you notice any issues or if you have any questions about the setup.

[newbold]

This would be in places like {post-list} and {recent-posts}, right? Or would you want it anywhere else?

I’ve just rapidly prototyped (heh) one possible solution, which is this new configuration item (which is live now if you want to test it):

Truncation appendix:  […]

(Note the extra space between the colon and the open bracket, which is intentional since this will just be appended right onto the end of the title.)

This works pretty much as you’d expect—if a post is titleless and the title is truncated, and you have Truncation appendix defined, the truncation appendix will be appended to the title. Right now I’m just doing this in the post and recent posts lists, but let me know if you think it would make sense to do it elsewhere too.

[bixfrankonis]

The reason I was stumped was that it technically should appear in the <title> HTML element, too, but I’m not clear if there’s a way to do that given the division between {post-title} and {title}, without it also appearing appended to that element on regular titled posts where it doesn’t make sense.

[newbold]

I’m still waking up, so forgive me if I’m way out of whack here, but would it be OK if I just made it so that the new truncation appendix was applied to {post-title}? That feels right to me in this pre-caffeinated state, but let me know what you think. (I’m also assuming that you’re using {post-title} in your template’s <title> tag.)

[bixfrankonis]

That's where my general state of confuzzlement comes from: it wasn't clear to me if you were able to have the truncation appendix only show up in <title> when it's a technically untitled post, or if it would just get appended to anything (since it wouldn't make sense on an actually titled post).

[bixfrankonis]

(Also, I notice that it doesn't get picked up in the post lists on the search results or tags pages, either.)