I’m trying to stop posts I write that have a specific category showing up on the micro.blog timeline.
In my micro.blog account settings, the only feed I have in the feeds section is this one, which corresponds to my main blog feed.
I edited my template layouts/index.json so that posts of the specific category don’t show up in it. I confirmed that the posts concerned aren’t showing in the feed by visiting the URL directly in my web browser. All seems good.
And yet my posts to that category are still showing on the micro.blog timeline! Including posts made after I made that change (I wasn’t expecting historic ones to change). Refreshing the feed doesn’t help.
For example my latest MB timeline entry simply reads ‘test’ - but that doesn’t appear in the json file that I thought fed the timeline.
The “test” is a real post, referring to the post at - The Braindump Blog But it’s in a category that the feed doesn’t show so I thought would mean not in the timeline.
(I also edited layouts/index.xml so it’s not in the RSS either. )
I think I’m confused about how the timeline is populated ! Can anyone help me understand what I’d need to do to stop a category posting in the timeline? Thank you so much.
If you navigate to the Edit Sources & Cross-posting page, do you see the right feed there and only that one? Your Micro.blog timeline is powered by the feeds listed there, so if you see the test post on your timeline, it’s probably present in one of those feeds.
Thanks very much @sod for confirming how the timeline should work! It’s baffling me to be honest.
The only feed I have listed in that section is https://thebraindumpblog.com/feed.json
And as far as I can tell it doesn’t contain a post from today with the text ‘Test123’ anywhere in it.
But the my micro.blog timeline does show it!
At least to me. I assume what I see in my timeline is what everyone else sees? Maybe I’m wrong about that.
I’m sorry to ask a favour but if you do happen to have time would you mind seeing if the latest post on my timeline says just the word ‘Test123’?
I did try deleting that feed from the sources page and then adding it again in case some weird caching thing might have happened but it didn’t fix it.
Yes, we see the same timeline. Maybe it’s a timing or cache issue, that Micro.blog happened to fetch the old version of the feed (containing the test post) right before it was updated?
Try removing the test entry from your feed, then go to the Edit Sources & Cross-posting page again and hit the refresh button . After doing that, does the test post reappear on the timeline or not?
If I remove the offending post from my timeline manually and then refresh the feed then it does not come back.
But if I then make a new post of the same category that should be hidden then the new one shows up (I added ‘test234’ now).
So I suppose one half solution is I manually delete the ones I don’t want to show quickly but I’m so curious how they are getting onto the timeline in the first place!
I feel like I must have done something wrong with my feed.json but not sure what.
Maybe this is something @manton has to look into then. There could be a caching issue or bug causing this behavior. The Micro.blog timeline should not really be able to imagine or invent posts that aren’t there.
My guess is that either Micro.blog somehow fetches and old version of the JSON feed, containing all the posts (unfiltered). Or new posts temporarily exist under a different category: long enough for Micro.blog to scoop them up to show on the timeline, but short enough so that we don’t see them when we manually look at the JSON feed.
. After doing that, does the test post reappear on the timeline or not?
but I’m so curious how they are getting onto the timeline in the first place!