Feedburner post does not contain author

[ihuston]

The Feedburner feed seems to ignore the author field and duplicates any images in the post. This is a problem because the main Pivotal content site has started to pick up posts from the Engineering blog and repost them.

See for example this post which appears on the main Pivotal blog without author attribution.

The picture in the post is also duplicated in the Feedburner item and main Pivotal blog:

Looking at the XML feed the author does not appear in the item header:

<item>
      <title>Trilogy and Greenplum for Data Science TDD</title>
      <link>http://engineering.pivotal.io/post/trilogy-and-greenplum/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 Feb 2017 16:26:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>http://engineering.pivotal.io/post/trilogy-and-greenplum/</guid>

[ihuston]

The problem with the author is due to the default Hugo RSS template using the Site.Author parameter which we have not set.

I have created a site default RSS template in 4ebe2fe which uses the post's Author information to fill the <author> tag. This tag is supposed to contain an email address with author's name optionally in parentheses. Where available the new template will use the Author.Email attribute, and otherwise fill in with [email protected].

[ihuston]

The duplicate image issue is caused by using the responsive-figure short-code, which creates two images in the HTML, one fixed size, one responsive, and hides one depending on the viewport size.

In the RSS feed both images are displayed because the display:none attribute from the CSS is not processed.

There are a few options for fixing this that I can see:

1. include style info in the HTML pages so they get rendered by RSS readers correctly.
2. change the html processor used in the RSS template somehow to strip the extra image.
3. only use figure instead of responsive-figure in posts that will get picked up from RSS

In the interest of time I have chosen option 3 above for this particular post in 484cdb1.

[tammersaleh]

@osis I think we might want to reconsider this approach to responsive images, ideally finding a solution that degrades well without CSS, and uses CSS (or javascript?) to make the images present well on any size screen.

[tammersaleh]

@ihuston does this mean each individual author will now show up in RSS feeds? If so, sweet.

[ihuston]

@tsaleh Yes, the RSS feed should now contain author names:

<item>
<title>Trilogy and Greenplum for Data Science TDD</title>
<link>
http://engineering.pivotal.io/post/trilogy-and-greenplum/
</link>
<pubDate>Mon, 27 Feb 2017 16:26:00 +0000</pubDate>
<author>[email protected] (Ian Huston)</author>
<guid>
http://engineering.pivotal.io/post/trilogy-and-greenplum/
</guid>

If you want to link your real email, you can add it in the data/authors/my_name.yml file:

Name: Homer Simpson
Twitter: homer
Email: [email protected]

[andreasscherbaum]

I can confirm that the individual author name shows up in the RSS feed.

However now there is a small but different problem:
the author name links no longer to the Twitter account, but to a page on the blog - which does not exist:

http://engineering.pivotal.io/categories/postgresql/

In addition to that, would be nice if the author name on article pages is a link too.

[ihuston]

@andreasscherbaum, there shouldn't be any links in the RSS feed itself. The author tag is just an email address and optional name. For example here is the XML for your latest post in the feed:

<item>
<title>
The File protocol for External Tables in Greenplum Database
</title>
<link>
http://engineering.pivotal.io/post/The_File_protocol_for_External_Tables_in_Greenplum_Database/
</link>
<pubDate>Wed, 25 Jan 2017 01:18:23 +0100</pubDate>
<author>[email protected] (Andreas Scherbaum)</author>
<guid>
http://engineering.pivotal.io/post/The_File_protocol_for_External_Tables_in_Greenplum_Database/
</guid>
<description>

Where are you seeing this link? Perhaps it would be better to open another more specific issue and provide an example there.

On the article pages, the author is linked to their Twitter account if provided in the author file, e.g. <a href="https://twitter.com/ianhuston">Ian Huston</a> from http://engineering.pivotal.io/post/trilogy-and-greenplum/.

[andreasscherbaum]

@ihuston I'm not talking about the RSS feed, but the change has some fallout. Just follow the link I posted:

http://engineering.pivotal.io/categories/postgresql/

And klick on any author name.

[tammersaleh]

Hi Andreas, Would it be possible for you to make this fix yourself, since you seem to understand the problem more?

On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 11:11 AM Andreas Scherbaum ***@***.***> wrote: @ihuston <https://github.com/ihuston> I'm not talking about the RSS feed, but the change has some fallout. Just follow the link I posted: http://engineering.pivotal.io/categories/postgresql/ And klick on any author name. — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#139 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAAH4Fk1kDFRxfFM303wOu5xUD7QsYQ6ks5rqU1NgaJpZM4MSG-G> .

-- Cheers, Tammer Sent from my iPhone.

[andreasscherbaum]

Me, dive into the strange template code again?

Uhm, ok ...

[ihuston]

It's surprising to me that changing the RSS template could have any effect on the normal pages. First step might be to locally pull the commit before my change above and confirm the problem goes away.

…

On Tue, 28 Mar 2017, 19:56 Andreas Scherbaum, ***@***.***> wrote: Me, dive into the strange template code again? Uhm, ok ... — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#139 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ABQtfJKpGShKE2q8LS5SV80P1WQ2m_vSks5rqVfFgaJpZM4MSG-G> .

[osis]

@andreasscherbaum Is the links issues fixed with your new author pages? I can't see any rogue links in the feeds as it is today.

Also the <author> tag is displayed as-is in a lot of readers.

I would suggest that we adjust to name strings only, which is what most other publications do.

Also, I feel like we're talking about a few different issues here. Let me try to split this up a bit... Duplicate Images (#150)

[andreasscherbaum]

Just checked, the author does not show up (for my post) here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/PivotalEngineeringJournal
And the other authors have the LinkedIn link now, no longer the email address.

That's strange, I remember that last time I checked the email address showed up.

[osis]

I'm not sure how much I trust feedburner to validate. I don't see authors on other publications as well. http://feeds.feedburner.com/businessinsider/science

Authors do show up for me in Feedly, which is good enough for me at this point. I still feel like we should tweak the formatting to be in line with others.

[andreasscherbaum]

If you look at the posting from @ihuston from end of March, there was the author information in it. Why is it gone now?

[osis]

Oh, I think he was looking at the feed itself instead of Feedburner. http://engineering.pivotal.io/index.xml

I see authors in this raw rss feed.

Correction
Authors seem to be in feedburner as well.
view-source:http:feeds.feedburner.com/PivotalEngineeringJournal

[osis]

Another datapoint for formatting authors in the feed...

If we add the twitter hashtags, instead of name & email, we can have IFTTT auto tweet and tag the authors. This would fix #102 and might be a step towards #85.

[osis]

Hmmmm this might leave out people who don't have twitter like https://github.com/pivotal/blog/blob/master/data/authors/ssmith.yml.

Let's put this particular issue to bed since it seems to be solved.

[ascherbaum-pivotal]

You might be able to place this information in the header of the article, as comments. But I'm not sure if IFTTT can extract it from there.