Topic: Suggestion for Asylum RSS feed

A few months back I switched over to Firefox (yay me!), and one of the things I enjoy about the browser is the "Live Bookmark" function, which allows you to load RSS feeds in bookmark folders. After my recent "return" to the Asylum, I noticed the Live Bookmark icon at the bottom of the browser. I'm pretty sure I heard from TP at one point that the Asylum had an RSS feed, but I was never all that interested. With Live Bookmarks, though, reading feeds is so much easier. I added the Asylum feed to my bookmaks, and since then today is the first time I have actually browsed through the Asylum (to get to this forum so I could post this message).

Anyway, my suggestion: I was wondering if it would be possible to have the forum name be part of the feed entry. For example, rather than just having "Suggestion for Asylum RSS feed" in the feed, we could have "Mad Scientists' Laboratory: Suggestion for Asylum RSS feed." If that's a little long, maybe we could have abbreviations or something. Whatever would be easier, though.

This is a very low priority thing, of course, and just an idea. It would make browsing the feed that much nicer.

[Edit: Hey, I just realized that yesterday was my 3rd Asylum birthday! Happy Asylum birthday to me! Ahem, sorry.]

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Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup | "Hooray for linguistic idiots and yak milk!"

(Edited by Suho1004 on 04-15-2005 04:45)

I kinda like the way the feed is. I use Opera instead of FF and it shows it to me very neatly never had a problem with it but you obviously are finding some difficulty.

Nah, no difficulty. Firefox does a decent enough job with the feed. I just thought it would be neat to see the forum that a certain thread is in as well. Some of the threads are obvious, but other thread titles aren't.

Like I said, though, no big deal, just a thought. I know TP's got plenty on his hands as it is.

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Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup | "Hooray for linguistic idiots and yak milk!"

I think (note the think) that RSS items in the feed can be categorised, so that news aggregators can allow you to view posts only from a specific category. Given the general usage of RSS feeds, on news sites and on blogs, this makes a lot of sense, so if it isn't there, I'd be wondering why.


Justice 4 Pat Richard

I agree, Suho.

The way it is now is just a big jumbled mess - almost pointless.

Having some built in categorization would be a big plus.

Here's an idea:
Make a list of what you want,
find out how to represent it in rss.
Drop it in my mailbox (or a post in here)
and if it's sufficient info for me not to do any more research on it and start working,
consider it done within a week.

Deal?

Sounds good to me. I'll start working on it tomorrow, and when I get something done I'll either send you an email or try to catch you on Q (or both).

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Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup | "Hooray for linguistic idiots and yak milk!"

Actually, why don't I just post here, because there's a good chance that I don't know what I'm talking about. I don't really use RSS feeds outside of FF's live bookmarks (I don't use any other aggregators, etc.), so I'm not really sure what Skaarjj is referring to when he says "view feeds by categories." The way I see it, you would only be able to view feeds by category if a category system was specified in the first place, right? The Asylum feed does not appear to have any such system.

What I was originally thinking of for the Asylum is something like this:

<item rdf:about="http://www.ozoneasylum.com/25516">

<title>Mad Scientists' Laboratory | Suggestion for Asylum RSS feed</title>

<link>http://www.ozoneasylum.com/25516</link>

<dc:date>2005-04-17T06:29:39-07:00</dc:date>

</item>

The only difference between this and what we have now is the "Mad Scientists' Laboratory | " that I added to the title tag. Since the feed is generated dynamically, I'm guessing that it shouldn't be too hard to include the forum name in the generation process. Not knowing how it works, though, I can't be sure.

The above syntax is just one idea. Alternatively, we could have the forum name in parentheses after the thread title: "Suggestion for the Asylum RSS feed (Mad Scientists' Laboratory)." If this tends to make title tags too long, we could have abbreviations: "Suggestions for the Asylum RSS feed (MSL)."

This was my original idea. Nothing fancy, just a little indication of which forum each thread belonged to. I don't know anything about categories or other RSS architectural schemes, so if anyone knows of a better or more efficient way to do this, I'd be interested in hearing about it.

___________________________
Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup | "Hooray for linguistic idiots and yak milk!"

(Edited by Suho1004 on 04-18-2005 06:40)

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss#ltcategorygtSubelementOfLtitemgt

As shown here, there is a category sub-element that can be used to categorise feeds. Or seperate feeds could be created for each forum.


Justice 4 Pat Richard

problem is that's rss 2.0 - and I have no clue wether most or any aggregators can read this.

I believe, the current feed is rss 0.92.

But Suho is researching this... just hold on ;-)

So long,

->Tyberius Prime

Yup. I will be looking into this and posting when I have more info.

Thanks for your patience.

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Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup | "Hooray for linguistic idiots and yak milk!"

Well, I had 10 minutes this sunday morning and implemented RSS 2.0 on the grail's beta system (see http://grail.coonabibba.de/rsschanges for the feed) - but apperantly the browser's don't care at all about the category tag... NARF.

Sorry for taking so long to report on this. From what I can see, RSS 2.0 is widely accepted, but not necessarily widely supported (i.e., stuff that isn't understood/recognized is just ignored).

So the category tag idea is out. Having separate feeds was suggested above, but I wonder if that wouldn't just make things more complicated. Then there's my original idea. Other than that, I don't know what else to say.

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Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup

well... I suggest we implement RSS 2.0 and provide a patch to the firefox team.

Anyone got a time machine at hand?

Alas, I just sold my last time machine to pay the electricity bill.

___________________________
Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup

you know... it doesn't matter when you get me one. It just matters that you get me one, eventually...

Hey, good point. Unfortunately, if I were to ever get a time machine at some point in the future I would use it to return to this moment so I could present it to you...

*waits*

...and it would appear that there are no more time machines in my future. Bummer.

___________________________
Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup

Well, honestly, as an extension what would it need to do? Turn a Live Bookmark into a Live Bookmark folder (iterating down as many levels as necessary) and placing all the posts of the one category inside the one folder. if I knew how to program half as well as I need to to accomplish that, then I'd do it. However I will submit a suggestion to them.


Justice 4 Pat Richard

Yes, getting back to the matter at hand, that would be nice. That sort of thing would be very useful not only at the Asylum, but at any board with an RSS feed.

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Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup

*bump*

It'd cool to have a little number indicating the number of replies to a thread in the title tag of the RSS. Something like :
(19) Suggestion for Asylum RSS feed