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authorBradley Taunt <bt@btxx.org>2024-02-02 12:39:46 -0500
committerBradley Taunt <bt@btxx.org>2024-02-02 12:39:46 -0500
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+Fri, 06 May 2022
+FULL POSTS ARE NOW RENDERED INSIDE RSS READERS
+
+Your subscribers can now read your full articles without leaving the
+comfort of their RSS readers.
+
+I have finally succeeded after fighting with properly rendering full
+post content directly _inside_ RSS readers. I struggled with this
+implementation far longer than I'd like to admit. Although, that's to
+be expected with my caveman knowledge of RSS feeds and my simple monkey
+brain.
+
+But here we are! We made it.
+
+
+INSPIRATION
+-----------
+
+The thought of rendering all the content within users' RSS readers was
+always something I wanted for the initial launch of Shinobi Website. It
+was taking me a while to understand the layout issues caused by
+articles being pure plain text, so I ended up giving up for version
+"1.0".
+
+Then fellow web-minimalist Matthew Graybosch kindly reached out and
+showed off his own beautifully crafted shinobi website[0]. Browsing
+through his site and articles I quickly realized a few rendering woes
+of my own:
+
+1. Having set the reading length to 72, I was hurting the reading
+experience for mobile users
+2. Matthew was doing a lot more cool things on his site (D&D style
+tables, separating specific feeds into their own directories)
+
+Shortly after this exchange I was contacted by another plain-text web
+enthusiast, Koray Er[1]. They were inspired to start building out
+their own Shinobi Website. This is where the question was brought up
+regarding full post rendering:
+
+> i want the entire content in my rss reader - not just one line. the
+best i could do was put $(tail -n +4 $file) in the description. that
+works, but without line breaks. is it possible to fix that in rss.sh? i
+don't want to change the txt - it's so pure.
+
+This was the final straw. I _needed_ to get this working in _some_
+capacity.
+
+
+CDATA TO THE RESCUE
+-------------------
+
+I played around with converting plain text to HTML and pasting it
+inside the XML at build time. This created more problems than it fixed.
+But finally, after roughly 2 hours of going down multiple rabbit holes
+of failure, I mashed together a few concepts from everyone's trusty
+copy/paste site: stackoverflow.
+
+Take a look at the newly updated shell script here:
+
+> https://shinobi.website/script.sh
+
+The only change I have made is inside the `description` tag within the
+individual `item` elements. Take a look if you're interested.
+
+Wait, what the heck that CDATA junk, you might be asking?
+
+> CDATA is defined as blocks of text that are not parsed by the parser,
+but are otherwise recognized as markup.
+
+After that we use `sed` to swap out any newlines with HTML line break
+elements. Nothing crazy there.
+
+NOTE:
+As you may have noticed on the main page of this project, the `rss.sh`
+code snippet has been replaced with a direct link to a new `script.sh`.
+Those wishing to implement this new style of formatting will need to
+make the shell changes manually.
+
+
+CAVEATS
+-------
+
+Please note that if you are planning to render your content this way
+there are minor things to look out for.
+
+1. Pasting code examples is a big no-no. The content will be mangled
+and the reader will try to render example snippets as HTML elements.
+Your best bet is to link directly to example files elsewhere in your
+directory.
+
+^ THIS IS NO LONGER TRUE. See details below.[2]
+
+2. This may not work for every single RSS Reader. I can't test every
+application out there in the wild nor can I double check different
+operating systems. All I know is this renders fine for me on macOS
+using NetNewsWire.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES
+---------
+[0]: https://matthewgraybosch.com/
+[1]: https://korayer.de/
+[2]: This issue has been fixed thanks to Matthew Graybosch's excellent
+patch. See patch notes here:
+https://git.sr.ht/~tdarb/shinobi-script/log?from=7e2f8bd312d648ff1c8d3cf
+dc747d2e5634100d7#log-7e2f8bd312d648ff1c8d3cfdc747d2e5634100d7
+
+
+Thanks for reading my humble blog (maybe directly in your RSS reader
+this time too!),
+-- Brad \ No newline at end of file