As someone who follows many RSS feeds via NNTP in Gnus, I often find myself opening some entries just to skim them and understand what they are about. This happens because some item titles alone do not provide enough context so I can act accordingly. A matter exacerbated by the fact that these entries normally fall outside my scoring rules.

In contrast, some websites prepend their content types to the article titles, helping a lot with that initial action. Rather than modifying the article titles though, this technique can be applied directly to the RSS entries. In fact, feed entries can not only differ but also be independent of the website content, which enables things like RSS-only posts.

Since I already categorize all the content here, I decided to prepend this information to the RSS item titles, leaving the article pages intact. While editing the template, I also added the <category> element as some feed readers support it. In Hugo, this was just two one-liners (formatted here for readability):

<!-- layouts/_default/rss.xml -->
<title>
  {{ with .Params.categories }}
    {{ index . 0 | lower | i18n }}:
  {{ end }}
  {{ .Title }}
</title>

<!-- layouts/_default/rss.xml -->
{{ with .Params.categories }}
  <category>
  {{ index . 0 | lower | i18n }}
  </category>
{{ end }}

I really liked how much more readable and organized the feed became with this change. It makes reasoning and acting on the entries much simpler.

For example, compare Balcony with Projects: Balcony, Essays: Balcony, or Photographs: Balcony. There is nothing wrong with the article title per se, but the labeled versions are far more informative at a glance in a feed context.

So if your website also has different post categories, go ahead and prepend them to your RSS feed titles as well. As a potential reader of your feed, I will thank you.

P.S.: Chromium users may need a different browser or, even better, a dedicated feed reader to check the results out.