Introducing RSS-Only Posts

I’ve just added a new feature to the blog: RSS-only posts. These are pieces of content that appear exclusively in your feed reader but are never rendered as public web pages.

This post itself is an RSS-only post that you’re reading it in your feed, not on the website.

Why did I add this feature?

Because RSS is great, so are you for using it.

I also wanted a way to share quick thoughts, and experimental ideas with RSS subscribers.

How does it work?

Summary:

1. Put rss-only content under content/rss-only/ (I use year subfolders like 2026/).
2. Use an archetypes/rss-only.md that sets build.render: link so Hugo processes the content but does not emit an HTML file.
3. Update the feed template to include rss-only pages.
4. [Optional] Update tag/taxonomy templates to exclude rss-only items from public tag counts and listings.

Archetype

archetypes/rss-only.md should include the build directives. Example:

---
title: "{{ replace .File.ContentBaseName "-" " " | title }}"
date: {{ dateFormat "2006-01-02T15:04:05-03:00" .Date }}
lastmod: {{ dateFormat "2006-01-02T15:04:05-03:00" .Date }}
slug: "{{ .File.ContentBaseName }}"
description: ""
image: ""
draft: false
featured: false
tags: []
build:
 list: local
 render: link
 publishResources: false
---

build.render: link is the key: it prevents HTML output while keeping the content available to templates and the feed.

Feed template

If you want RSS-only posts to appear in your feed alongside regular posts, update your feed template (for example layouts/index.atom.xml) to include them explicitly. For example, to include only posts and rss-only:

{{/* include posts + rss-only only */}}
{{ $types := slice "posts" "rss-only" }}
{{ range (where .Site.RegularPages "Type" "in" $types) | sort "Date" "desc" }}
 <entry>
 <!-- standard feed entry markup -->
 </entry>
{{ end }}

I use .Site.RegularPages and filter by Type to make sure only the content types I want are included.

[Optional] Excluding rss-only from tag counts and tag pages

Hugo’s taxonomies (tags) are built from all content that declares tags. You cannot stop Hugo from creating the taxonomy entries, but you can exclude rss-only items when rendering tag lists and tag pages. Below are templates you can drop into your theme to achieve that.

1) Terms/Tag index (list of all tags)

If you render a tag cloud or list of tags (commonly layouts/_default/terms.html or a partial), compute counts while excluding rss-only pages:

{{ range $name, $pages := .Site.Taxonomies.tags }}
 {{ $public := where $pages "Type" "ne" "rss-only" }}
 {{ $count := len $public }}
 {{ if gt $count 0 }}
 <a href="{{ (path.Join "/tags/" $name | urlize) | relURL }}">{{ $name }} ({{ $count }})</a>
 {{ end }}
{{ end }}

This shows only tags that have at least one non-rss-only page and uses the filtered count.

2) Single tag page (list posts for a tag)

On the tag detail page (layouts/_default/taxonomy.html or your tag template), filter out rss-only pages before rendering the list:

{{ $pages := where .Pages "Type" "ne" "rss-only" | sort "Date" "desc" }}
{{ if eq (len $pages) 0 }}
 <p>No public posts for this tag.</p>
{{ else }}
 {{ range $pages }}
 <!-- render excerpt/summary -->
 {{ end }}
{{ end }}

You can also choose to return a 404 if len $pages == 0, depending on how you want empty tag pages to behave.

3) Counting tags elsewhere

Anywhere you compute or display tag counts, apply the same where "Type" "ne" "rss-only" filter to avoid counting feed-only posts.

Notes and caveats

• Hugo will still include tags in .Site.Taxonomies if any content (including rss-only) declares them. The approach above hides those tags from public lists and prevents them from contributing to counts.
• If you want tags never to be built at all, you’d need a preprocessing step (e.g., a short script that removes tags from front matter for rss-only items before hugo runs), but in most cases filtering in templates is cleaner.

Questions, comments, or feedbacks? Feel free to reach out by email, mastodon, or webmention.