If I’m understanding this help page about Feeds, there should automatically be a JSON feed for every category, but I’m not seeing that. I only get 404/Not Found responses.
In particular I want to use the feed https://marygrayson.net/categories/txt/feed.json (corresponding to Mary Grayson - txt).
Note that the corresponding XML feedis there and looks okay. But crossposts to Bluesky are missing included images, and I saw a reply on here somewhere that JSON feed worked better for that than XML. Feedback on that assertion is also welcome!
This blog uses a “custom theme” based on “Marfa”. Any changes I made (long forgotten) would have been very simple & presentation/CSS-based, as that’s what “theme” means to me. Certainly I wouldn’t have done anything here with whatever alternativeoutputformats is.
Okay, well I’ve gotten this fixed, though I’m not sure quite how. The way this works, relative to themes, has my head kind of spinning. If features like category-based feeds are indeed dependent on theme implementations, I think that’s very much worth mentioning in the docs (i.e., that help page I linked).
I’m also, honestly, pretty unclear about the theme configuration I see in my “Design” view. It previously showed Marfa as the theme, though below that it shows a “Custom theme”, in my case here called “MG” (I name I’m sure I set). But which is it? Marfa? or MG? I’d thought before that it was like Marfa was a base, and then MG is a copied/“instantiated” version of that. Maybe that’s right, though again this UI doesn’t make that clear to me.
To fix the category-feed issue, I poked around other users & their themes until I found one for which categories/xxx/feed.json worked. And I found one that used the “Tiny” theme. I switched my test blog to that, and voila: category-feed works.
But then, after watching a theme intro video that Manton made, it seems that there are some default/boilerplate parts of themes that get copied in if a theme doesn’t specify them. Like JSON feed stuff. Hmm. So I switched the blog back to Marfa – the difference now is that Marfa shows as “installed” on my blog, where before it didn’t, even though it had pride of place on my Design page as if it were – and the category-json-feed still works.
So maybe this kind of feed JSON is now part of the mysterious set of basic/default stuff, but wasn’t before? And so switching to any theme created it? Maybe I just don’t have the right mental model for what’s going on here.
Meanwhile I’m happy to report that using the now-working JSON feed in my “Sources & Cross-posting” settings did indeed fix my original issue. New posts that have images now include them when cross-posting to Bluesky.
Sorry, the way Micro.blog handles themes is really confusing! The “custom theme” field is better thought of as a sort of container that can hold edits to templates. It could be a completely standalone theme, but more likely it has templates that override things in the theme that was installed via a plug-in.
It does sound like sometime in the past, the old default templates for categories was copied to your custom theme, and so when we added the JSON Feed for categories, that change was essentially overridden already.