Bluesky outbound RSS and images

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#17 2 comments 2 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
javascript
Domain
backend

Research direction

Start by reproducing the Bluesky RSS examples linked in the issue and inspect how the package handles item descriptions and image metadata. Trace the RSS parsing entry point for enclosure elements and the literal [contains quote post or other embedded content] text. Done means image metadata is exposed from enclosures and the confusing placeholder is absent from item descriptions.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

There are two issues I'd like to report here.

Use enclosure element for image

An example of a Bluesky user who publishes great cartoons that totally belong everywhere. I want to include them in one of my projects but it doesn't work because the images don't come through in the feed. Some pointers.

  1. Example of a post containing an image.
  2. The RSS feed for that user's posts.
  3. Some browsers make it hard to view the source of a feed, so here's a link that gets through that.

You won't break anything if you add an enclosure element for each item with an image (only one enclosure per item btw) with the type and size of the image.

<enclosure url="https://url.of/image" type="img/png" length="82286"/>

Most feed readers will understand and do something nice with the image. And the ones who don't should ignore the enclosure. Lots of feed sources out there do it this way.

Confusing text in description

Not sure how this happens, but some item-level descriptions have mysterious text in them.

[contains quote post or other embedded content]

Here's an example.

<item>
   <link>https://bsky.app/profile/mariopro.bsky.social/post/3lmhnycmqwc2t</link>
   <description> [contains quote post or other embedded content]</description>
   <pubDate>10 Apr 2025 13:58 +0000</pubDate>
   <guid isPermaLink="false">at://did:plc:jrhiazkqht2txt7xiixad5v7/app.bsky.feed.post/3lmhnycmqwc2t</guid>
   </item>

In most feed readers the description element is displayed, and no one is looking for helpful software messages there. Users will have no idea how to interpret this. It should not be there.

Dominant language
JavaScript
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104
Forks
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