[sword-devel] RSS feeds and news page

[Chris Little]

In general, this isn't what I had pictured from the suggestion of 
aggregating RSS feeds from the front-end projects. The page, as it is, 
looks essentially like pageflakes or iGoogle, and I think that kind of 
functionality is better left to those sites.

What I had thought you were suggesting was that we supplement the 
existing news feed at http://crosswire.org/sword/index.jsp with news 
pulled in from other RSS feeds. Not that I've looked at the code or 
anything, but this should be relatively trivial. This also has the 
advantage of putting everything in the same pot. As you have it, there 
are separate boxes for a number of apps and one box for everything else, 
which will tend to give the apps with separate boxes much more exposure 
(even if their news is extremely old).

As to the content itself:
- We really should not be republishing forum updates to any kind of news 
page. It's just encouraging further spam and is of no discernible value 
to most users. Those who want to read forum updates can find the forum 
RSS feeds or just check the forums constantly.
- SVN updates of all types are similarly not appropriate to a general 
news page. They're mostly noise to the casual user. (Again, those with 
an interest should find the appropriate feeds or subscribe to the 
mailing list.)
- Twitter feeds are artificially short, without needing to be so in this 
context. Twitter also represents a considerably different type of 
discourse from blogs, with different levels of formality and different 
audiences. I don't know that the two can types can be successfully 
intermixed.

--Chris