RSS feed fixed

[castaway]

I got curious enough about the regular complaints about our RSS feed to actually prod my favourite god into looking at the script which produces it, it turned out the problem was a simple fix, so we've fixed it. (Ok, he did :).

So, that should be working now, it still only refreshes daily, which is probably not as useful as it could be. Another improvement is in the works, to replace the external cron script with a node similar to our XML generators, thus providing an up-to-the-minute RSS feed.

C.

[bronto]

I agree that an RSS feed that gets updated daily is not as useful as it could be in the specific case of PerlMonks. But I also think that an "up-to-the-minute" version could be overkill for the site in terms of server load.

I'd suggest a static, hourly updated RSS feed, that could be a good balance in terms of server load and usefulness.

My 2 cents (of Euro :-)

[enoch]

I might be asking too much, but...

It would be really nice if each section — Meditations, Perl Monks Discussion, SoPW, etc. — produced its own RSS feed.

[bronto]

Other suggestions for RSS improvement

Since that we have a nice feed reader written in Perl, that does a good job in aggregating the news and lets you see the news summary when provided, it would be good if:

• a small summary of the nodes could be provide in the feed. For example, the summary could be the first part of the text parts of the nodes until the first <code> tag is encountered, and up to 200 chars;
• a date/time could be provided with each item, matching the post date/time of the referred node

Just some more cents ;-)

[jao]

Well, RSS is very usefull, but a dinamic one would be really heavy on the server. And I agree with bronto, when he says that.

It would be faster and easier on the server to generate static Files, w/ or w/o the comments.

Well, another idea is to use "Atom" as well.

[jdporter]

I disagree with those above who say that rss would entail a significant increase in server load. Look at what the XML tickers are already doing. Converting those (but cloning them first, to allow continued use of the existing scheme) to use RSS-compliant XML would be trivial!

[demerphq]

to use RSS-compliant XML would be trivial!

What does RSS compliant XML look like then? We already have facilities for producing different XML styles for the tickers so extending it shouldn't be difficult. Assuming RSS-compliant XML is not too different from what we currently have.

[jdporter]

I think RSS-formatted ticker feeds would differ from their current format(s) only syntactically. Semantically, the XML tickers re-invent the RSS wheel (in part; RSS is a (semantic) superset of the XML tickers).

I'd recommend conforming to RSS 2.0, because it's (allegedly) backward-compatible with 0.92, which is in turn backward-compatible with 0.91... And 0.91/0.92 are the de facto standards for RSS.

Here's a good article by perl monger Jonathan Eisenzopf: Making Headlines with RSS.

I haven't checked it out, but there is a XML::RSS module which supposedly makes RSS generation easier.

btw - If you're seriously considering this proposal, you might also be interested in another, "better" standard for syndication, the Atom protocol. Some blog sites, such as LiveJournal, support Atom, and it may supplant RSS as the de facto standard for syndication.