Today, by accident, I discovered that it is possible to use MemberSpace to protect some blog posts so they are available only to members.

There are two steps:

  • Step 1: Protect a URL in mass using the MemberSpace backend, e.g. /tax/*.
  • Step 2: Use tax as a category for the post.

The blog post’s title will appear on the homepage. When a reader clicks on the link, the reader is redirected to the log-in page for members.

Complication: RSS Feed

Problem: RSS Feed Content Not Protected

I realized and confirmed that the RSS feed for hanisarji.com provided the entire post’s content, even if I followed the steps above.

In an email on Nov. 11, 2021, MemberSpace’s support confirmed that it does not protect content on RSS feeds: “[T]he RSS feed removes your domain from the equation so we can’t protect content on those feeds unfortunately.”

Workaround: Use Post Excerpts

As a workaround, I changed my RSS feed to show only post excerpts, instead of the entire post.1

In feed.xml, I changed post.content to post.excerpt:

file-xml-image

After making this change, I realized that I must become more intentional with my post excerpts:

  • By default, Jekyll uses the first paragraph of a post as an excerpt.
  • You can indicate a post excerpt separator in the post’s YAML. But if you write excerpt_separator: <!--more--> and don’t have <!--more--> in your post, the RSS feed will display the entire post.
  • You cannot start a post with an HTML comment (<!-- Comment -->) as doing so would make the comment appear in the RSS feed.2
  • You cannot start a post with a raw Liquid tag without making a post excerpt because the RSS feed would show no post content.

Additional Thoughts

(1) If I protect posts this way, I need to indicate that a post is for members and requires signing in. I think the easiest way to do this is to add [Members] to the end of the title.

(2) If I want a post stream that is just for members, I will use Jekyll’s collections.

  1. Despite the annoying ads on the page, the code for the workaround is explained on How can I get a post excerpt in Jekyll?, NEWBEDEV. ↩

  2. I tried to remove comments from appearing in the post’s excerpts with the following change to feed.xml, but it didn’t do anything: <description>{{ post.excerpt | xml_escape | replace_regex: '/(<!--.*?-->)|(<!--[\S\s]+?-->)|(<!--[\S\s]*?$)/g', '' }}</description> ↩