Please improve the RSS Feed for Obsidian Publish

Use case or problem

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:

  1. Items only contain a title and a link, but no other metadata (such as date, image, description, author)
  2. The feed contains all pages of the site, but in chronological order, whereas most feed readers expect them in reverse chronological order
  3. 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.

Related feature requests (optional)

11 Likes

Yeah, I’d really like to be able to point friends to my Obsidian publish site but the RSS feed as it stands is kind of embarrassing.

totally agree. I’m a bit shocked after purchasing the annual plan for publishing…