Currently a site produced by Obsidian Publish will have a rudimentary /rss.xml feed, but it has three major flaws that make it pretty much unusable:
Items only contain a title and a link, but no other metadata (such as date, image, description, author)
The feed contains all pages of the site, but in chronological order, whereas most feed readers expect them in reverse chronological order
There are no settings that allow any kind of configuration of the RSS feed, such as what you want included, how many items you want, sort order, what kind of metadata, etc.
Proposed solution
The ideal solution would be a new configuration option for Obsidian Publish that lets us configure all of the following settings for the RSS feed:
Which information to include for each item in the feed (using the available metadata)
Title
Date
Author
Description
Cover image
Sort order of elements in the feed (e.g. chronological, reverse chronological, etc.)
Selection of items to include in the feed (maybe using a folder or using a particular tag, such as #blog, or recently added/new pages, or recently updated pages)
Maximum number of items to include in the RSS feed (for larger sites, you probably only want to include the last 20 or 50 items)
Some of these features were previously suggested in a May 2022 discussion (see below), but nothing seems to have happened since then.
Iām chiming in to say that Iād like to replace my entire blog with Publish, but the lackluster RSS feed and the lack of configurable permalinks for pages are holding me back.
Another non-awesome aspect of the current RSS feed implementation is that moved files are treated as new by Publish. If the files themselves are only moved and not modified, they should not spam the RSS feed
This is also my #1 feature request right now. Iād absolutely love to be able to use a published vault as an all in one personal website/blog and this is the only thing keeping me from doing so.
+1 vote for this from me too. A decent RSS feed is really needed for a blog-type site, which is one thing Iād love to be able to use Obsidian Publish for.
+1000 From me! I really need this feature for my flow. There are a lot of use cases. Like automatically creating social media content from the notes you published.
I would be happy to contribute this feature but publish code seems to be closed source.
It would also be very useful to have a setting where we could say āAll files within folder āblogā should be added to the RSS feed. Ignore the rest. Use property ādateā as RSS publish date instead of default file creation dateā or something like that.
Currently I run my own blog using Hugo, but if Obsidian Publish would introduce something like that, Iād be happy to switch to Obsidian Publish for my personal blog.
+1 here as well. Came to the forum to see what the deal is with Publish, and a lack of decent RSS has made the decision for me to stay where I am - writing everything in Obsidian and copy/pasting into another tool to publish.
I love all the suggestions, but can we start with something basic right now? Have the current feed in reverse chronological order. In other words, new posts first. I imagine thatās not technically that difficult to do. Itās probably just a small change to the rss code generator, and we would at least have an accurate chronologic representation to offer people to readers.