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RSS for certain threads ?

/pd [PersonRank 10]

Saturday, November 17, 2007
16 years ago3,555 views

Philipp, something to consider..

I am feeling the need to track certain convo's happening here. that is, an opt in for "comments rss" on any particular thread.

not sure what the others think, but I would like to know ..

mukthar [PersonRank 7]

16 years ago #

A much needed function, will be happy if implemented :-)

Kirby Witmer [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

me to! :)

Rohit Srivastwa [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

PD
I was thinking of some kind of FF extension which can notify you about latest comments

I'm not into coding things, but doesn't seems to be very difficult.
We have noticed that every post & comment gets an id.

Comments RSS to one thread will be difficult to manage as daily we have so many threads opening & it would be difficult to add those many RSS in reader daily. And we all want to read & work on most of the threads.

Philipp?

Art-One [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

/pd: my full support, I'm following this forum & blog also mainly via Google Reader, so I'm certain that I now misses a lot of the buzz ... As I didn't see that there were already some answers on your posting ;-)

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

The implementation of this without thinking about scaling it is actually very easy, probably below an hour – the only concern for me is scaling database connections. A short calculation shows there may be around 62 million new database requests per day for this feature (100 feed readers, each polling every half hour, for 13,086 threads...). So I would have to use some caching with static files, and that can sometimes generate some overhead (e.g. hard disk space, slower backups). But, I will keep thinking about this issue.

Oh, I just wish XHTML2 would already be out and widely supported – it allows RSS delimiters to be dropped right into normal tags such as <h2> or <p>. After all, why the need for a secondary format when HTML itself is already display-independent? RSS could have been implemented as HTML, too, or put differently, RSS could have been HTML :) (OK, I'm straying off-topic...)

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

I've got an idea: use Google Reader's infrastructure and forget about scaling. All your feeds will look like this:

http://www.google.com/reader/atom/feed/<RealUrlOfTheFeed>

E.g.: http://google.com/reader/atom/feed/http://feeds.feedburner.com/GoogleOperatingSystem

So you could use the cached version of each feed and every feed reader could subscribe to that version. Google Reader only updates a feed every hour, so you won't get too many requests.

Juha-Matti Laurio [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Any Firefox extension developers reading this thread now? ;-)

Art-One [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Philipp, thx for thinking about that!

Zim [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

RSS for comments will be a huge load for the server. Have you thought threads get buried, but if there are RSS subscriptions they will cause needless load to the server?
I think we need mail notifications instead... But in that case we'll need accounts or something like that :(

Sohil [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Philipp, have considered automatic purging of RSS feeds for threads (if that's possible) that are more than a month old (since those no new comments can be registered in such threads)?

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