Feeds and Search

Every build with at least one post emits feeds, a sitemap, and a search index.

Feeds and sitemap#

Blogin writes a site-wide Atom feed at public/feed.xml and a per-section feed at public/<section>/feed.xml. Entry links are absolute, built from base-url, so set that in blogin.json. A public/sitemap.xml lists every built page.

RSS 2.0 and JSON Feed are available alongside Atom. List the formats you want in feed-formats:

"feed-formats": ["atom", "rss", "json"]

Each format writes a site-wide file and a per-section file: Atom at feed.xml, RSS at rss.xml, and JSON Feed at feed.json. The default is ["atom"].

Search#

Search runs in the browser against a prebuilt index, so production stays static. The build writes public/search-index.json, one record per post with its title, url, date, tags, description, and stripped body text (truncated to search-text-length). It also emits public/assets/js/search.js, hand-written vanilla JavaScript that fetches the index, ranks matches (title and tag hits weigh more than body hits), and renders results.

Matching is by prefix, so results narrow as you type: c, then cs, then css each refine the same query rather than only matching a whole word.

The widget comes styled. The build emits public/assets/css/search.css beside the script, styling the input and rendering matches as a dropdown that floats under the box and hides itself when a query has no results. The styling is framework-neutral, so search looks right with or without a css-framework, and a site can override any of it in its own stylesheet.

Both go through the asset pipeline like anything else under assets/, so with fingerprint on they are written as search.<hash>.js and search.<hash>.css and the tags that reference them are rewritten to match. The index itself stays at public/search-index.json, since the script fetches it by a fixed path.

Add the form, stylesheet, and script to a page by including the _search.haml partial. Turn search off with "search": false, and cap results with search-cap.