Recent Updates (RSS Aggregation)

"Recent Updates" displays the latest posts from an external blog as cards on the homepage, browsable with left/right arrows (max 3). Ideal for landing mode: this site has no articles, but aggregates the latest from a separate blog onto the personal homepage.

recent_updates:
  enable: true
  rss_url: https://example.com/feed.xml  # blog RSS feed URL
  max_count: 3        # max number of cards (recommend ≤ 3)
  title: Recent Updates      # section title
  show_excerpt: true   # whether to show excerpts
  excerpt_length: 80   # max excerpt character count

How it works

The theme fetches and parses RSS at build time during hexo generate on the server, rendering post data directly into static HTML. Advantages:

• No CORS issues: the client doesn't need to make cross-origin RSS requests;
• Stable loading in mainland China: no dependency on third-party proxies (like rss2json, allorigins); the output is pure static HTML;
• SEO-friendly: post cards exist directly in the HTML.

note

Fetch failures do not abort the build — they only print a warning and hide the "Recent Updates" section on the homepage. So even if the blog RSS is temporarily unreachable, the site still generates fine.

Because data is fetched at build time, you need to re-run hexo generate after your blog updates to refresh the homepage cards (pair with CI/scheduled builds for automation).

RSS structure requirements

The theme ships with a lightweight parser (no extra dependencies) that supports both RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0. The default feeds generated by most blog systems (Hexo's hexo-generator-feed, WordPress, Ghost, Typecho, etc.) meet these requirements.

RSS 2.0

Each <item> should contain:

Field	Tag	Required	Notes
Title	<title>	Yes	Post title
Link	<link>	Yes	Post URL
Date	<pubDate>	Yes	RFC 822 format, e.g. Mon, 15 Jan 2024 10:00:00 +0800
Excerpt	<description> or <content:encoded>	No	Supports CDATA and HTML; tags are stripped and content truncated automatically

Atom 1.0

Each <entry> should contain:

Field	Tag	Required	Notes
Title	<title>	Yes	Post title
Link	<link href="..."/>	Yes	Post URL (takes the href attribute)
Date	<updated> or <published>	Yes	ISO 8601 format, e.g. 2024-01-15T10:00:00Z
Excerpt	<summary> or <content>	No	Supports CDATA and HTML; tags are stripped and content truncated automatically

Example (RSS 2.0)

<rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <item>
      <title>My First Post</title>
      <link>https://example.com/post-1</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 15 Jan 2024 10:00:00 +0800</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[<p>Post excerpt content.</p>]]></description>
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>

tip

Recommended: install hexo-generator-feed on your Hexo blog to generate RSS. Configure feed: { type: atom, path: feed.xml, limit: 20 } in your blog's root _config.yml, then point recent_updates.rss_url to that feed URL.