FreedomBox Ikiwiki RSS and Atom Feed Bug

Created by Steven Baltakatei Sandoval on 2021-01-04T18:38Z under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license and last updated on 2021-02-17T16:09Z.

Summary

I found a minor bug in how the FreedomBox's Ikiwiki application generates RSS and atom feeds. I reported it on the FreedomBox forum.

Background

As of 2021-01-04, this blog currently is rendered using Ikiwiki version 3.20190228-1 on FreedomBox version 20.21. While attempting to subscribe to my own blog's RSS feed using Thunderbird, I noticed that it threw an error saying the feed was invalid. It helpfully provided me a link to a page on the W3C Feed Validation Service that flagged the invalid lines in the RSS feed file and provided helpful explanations.

Since I'd like to use a FreedomBox to manage my personal blog for many years, I decided it would be valuable to report this error to see if it can't be fixed (similarly to how I reported another Freedombox domain name bug but on the BePasty app).

Details

Here is the markdown of my post on the FreedomBox Forum:

# Feedback on a Problem or for Improvement

**Summary**
ikiwiki RSS and atom feeds are not valid due to lack of domain name in URLs.

**Description**
After creating a blog, the RSS and atom feeds generated and linked on the blog main page uses relative links that do not contain a publicly-resolvable domain name. Therefore, feed does not validate when fed to the [W3C Feed Validation Service](https://validator.w3.org/feed/). See the screenshots below to see how the [RSS](https://reboil.com/ikiwiki/blog/index.rss) and [atom](https://reboil.com/ikiwiki/blog/index.atom) feeds on my Freedombox ikiwiki blog fail to validate.

**Proposed Solution**
Update default ikiwiki configuration files to use the Freedombox's domain name when automatically generating RSS and atom feeds.

For example, within my RSS feed on my Freedombox at domain name `reboil.com`,

    <link>/ikiwiki/blog/</link>

should probably be something like:

    <link>https://reboil.com/ikiwiki/blog/</link>

.

**Screenshots**

Invalid RSS feed:
![Screenshot from 2021-01-04 18-21-44|690x461, 100%](upload://oCoT9hhpQDm7oPjBkt6tBntLdJA.png) 

Invalid atom feed:
![Screenshot from 2021-01-04 18-36-36|690x431](upload://f3Wg5n53bRnAbXGeuHquV91sGnS.png)

Images

Below are screenshots of examples of invalid RSS and atom feeds that I referenced in my post.

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