Question(s) for RSS Readers

[BigMoneyJim]

I just changed the forum so that RSS feeds are visible to browsers. Mozilla/Firefox will pick this up, as will some others. (IE does not do this yet.) My only experience with RSS has been syndicating the feeds to other websites (well, and making RSS available); I haven't used any clients to read the feeds.

I made two feeds available: Recent Topics and Recent Posts. The request URL can be built to request topics or posts from a particular board even. I think I could even build a URL to track posts in a given thread by RSS (but I can't imagine why anyone would want that).

Also, does anyone care if the feeds are RSS versus RSS2? We can do either. Is one better than the other, and/or is one more compatible?

My question is: do you RSS client users think it would be beneficial to have a feed just for particular boards, say FIRE & Money and one or two others in addition to "all recent posts" and "all recent topics". Is it better for you to track posts or topics? Is it better to have more RSS feed choices or simpler to have fewer?

By the way, it's also possible to use RSS to view user profiles, new users (I think) and the news ticker items. I don't see a practical use for those capabilities here, though.

For those who don't know what I'm talking about, some discussion on this is in another thread. It's hard to give an easy answer to "what is RSS" because there is no standard user interface to read RSS, but that is actually a benefit for its purpose.

 

[donheff]

I get the RSS feed through bloglines.com. It comes through fine. I like it as is (all recent posts) but it is pretty busy (100-200 posts a day). An option for individual boards would be nice if it is easy to implement.

Don

 

[BigMoneyJim]

Thanks for the info. I like the idea of feeds for each board, so here's what I came up with: all topics, all posts and a posts feed for each board.

Topics
http://early-retirement.org/forums/index.php?type=rss2;action=.xml;sa=news;limit=10

Posts
http://early-retirement.org/forums/index.php?type=rss2;action=.xml;sa=recent;limit=10

Forum Admin
http://early-retirement.org/forums/index.php?board=16;type=rss2;action=.xml;sa=recent;limit=10

Hi, I am...
http://early-retirement.org/forums/index.php?board=4;type=rss2;action=.xml;sa=recent;limit=10

FIRE and Money
http://early-retirement.org/forums/index.php?board=6;type=rss2;action=.xml;sa=recent;limit=10

Life after FIRE
http://early-retirement.org/forums/index.php?board=9;type=rss2;action=.xml;sa=recent;limit=10

Young Dreamers
http://early-retirement.org/forums/index.php?board=10;type=rss2;action=.xml;sa=recent;limit=10

Other Topics
http://early-retirement.org/forums/index.php?board=5;type=rss2;action=.xml;sa=recent;limit=10

I changed the site template to offer these feeds to RSS-capable browsers. All previously used RSS URLs will still work as they did.

I also changed the version to RSS2.

Please let me know if there are problems or the feeds are pulling the wrong board.

Thanks!