RSS Debaucheries
Comments: 2
When I was a kid I thought Saturday nights would be all wine, women and song. In my newly-pubescent mind, unimaginable debaucheries awaited me.
Instead I find myself playing with RSS feeds. This may be as good as it gets for me.
Previously there were a couple of feeds available here: “index.xml” contained full posts while “index_short.rdf” ran excerpts. Now there are just excerpts (but they’ll be good excerpts!) and the file you want is plain old index.html.
I’m also experimenting with a comments feed because just running the 5 most recent comments over there in the side column isn’t turning out to be such a good way for me to keep up.
If you’ve been reading the excerpt-only version (index_short.rdf), then I need to ask you to move over to index.xml. Sorry for the hassle, but it’s better this way. (Until the mail starts coming in telling me that I’ve broken everything again.)
On the subject of feeds (and not meaning to reopen the great button debate), I’ve changed the “XML” in the buttons I’m using to “RSS” because as Anil Dash said, using “XML” to tell people where your feeds are is like a car dealership hanging up a sign that says “Steel.” Hard to argue with that.
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Posted to MetaStuff • 2002.11.10 (Sun) • 01:35
Comments
Posted by Ricardo 2002.11.10, 10:48
You’ve broken everything again =) Not everything, just the comments button on the front page. It’s pointing to index_short.xml and not to comments.xml
Another thing, that feed has a very large number of comments, isn’t it going to consume all your bandwidth?
Posted by jh 2002.11.10, 11:43
Oh, man! I should never work on anything after midnight. It’s always the astonishingly obvious things that trip me up. That link has been fixed and index_short.rdf decommissioned.
Ricardo, the feed you saw last night (my time) was indeed sending a lot of comments down the pipe. I think I’ve fixed that now and you should only see the last 15 comments posted.
The problem was in the way I’ve linked to comments on the main site here versus the way it should be done in the feed. On the site, links to comments basically take the form of the story page + the writer’s name + the ID number of the comment. This allows me to link to specific comments (i.e., specific parts of a story’s page).
In the feed, the link is just to the story page, so you have to scroll down to find the relevant comment. I was trying to duplicate the ‘specific pointer’ link structure of the site but couldn’t find a way to do it without having tons of comments shoved down the pipe.
It’s not a bad tradeoff, I guess, and the bandwidth is not being squandered quite so relentlessly.
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