Empty Atom/RSS feed for protobuf.dev/news

[ejona86]

Recent release notes keep mentioning Protobuf News as a source of important news. But how are we supposed to learn there are new news items? It seems it is just a bunch of bullets on a page.

In the HTML, Hugo is including alternate reference to an RSS feed, but the feed has no entries. Is that a bug? Or is there an alternate expected form of notification?

[Logofile]

Thanks for raising this issue. I'm looking into how to get Hugo/Docsy to populate the file at protobuf.dev/news/index.xml. It's turning into a bigger effort than it should be.

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[ejona86]

This is still an issue.

[Logofile]

I agree. This was closed by a bot, but it's still on my to-do list to address. I did do some research into this, but need to pick it back up.

[ejona86]

Without any way to receive news notifications, News is not a method of announcement. That's a real shame because it is clear effort is being put into them.

Right now they feel more like a notice "on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory."

[Logofile]

I swear that I've spent several hours trying to fix this! But your wonderful humor has inspired me to give it another go. Wish me luck!

[ejona86]

The default RSS template finds the news items. But the docsy RSS template doesn't use .Pages or .RegularPages when the parent of the section is Home and instead loops over the entire site's pages and filters by type: where $.Site.RegularPages "Type" $.Section. Unclear why it does that, but it seems it would generally be fine.

But that doesn't work because the news items all have type = "docs". Which... seems strange. It really seems like there should be news/chrony/ and news/release/ sections, and add date to news items to sort them. Since no date is set, removing type = "docs" is not enough, because the pages are in a random order and thus you can't show "the 50 most recent news items."

Backfilling dates is annoying but simple. But I don't know whether y'all would prefer making a new RSS template that uses .Pages (least invasive approach) or removing type = "docs" (probably best long-term, but unclear why that was done originally).

[Logofile]

This is exceedingly helpful information! I was actually talking to one of the creators of the Docsy theme, and even they didn't know about (or at least didn't mention) the type = "docs" issue. I'll play around with removing that and see if that affects the RSS feed in our implementation.

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We triage inactive PRs and issues in order to make it easier to find active work. If this issue should remain active or becomes active again, please add a comment.

This issue is labeled inactive because the last activity was over 90 days ago.