Force Fed

One of the primary reasons to design a new ClassicPress theme from the ground up was so that I would understand how it worked. That, in theory, would make it easier for me tinker and so, by and large, it proved. The last thing I knew I had to do¹ after it went live about 10 days ago was to add the microformats that would enable feed readers and IndieWeb stuff to make sense of the contents.

It was weird, though. Even before I had done anything, one of the testing tools was reporting both an h-feed and each h-entry within it. Something had taken matters into its own hands.

Because there were three entries in the feed, I suspected it must be the plugin that I use to show in the sidebar the three most recent posts that are not podcast episodes. My hunch was correct. Ultimate Posts Widget adds class="hfeed" to its output, and the microformat parsers correctly interpret that as being equivalent to h-feed even though I would rather they didn't.

Fortunately, Ultimate Posts Widget makes it easy to use a custom template so I copied the standard template, snipped out the references to hfeed and saved it as a custom template.

Job done, and I do believe everything is now working as it should. Just why Ultimate Posts Widget feels it should create a feed is beyond me, and thankfully I no longer need to care.