[sword-devel] RSS feeds and news page

[Nic Carter]

Hi Peter,

I really like what you're getting at here, which is improving the "news" section of the site. I agree with Chris in that I think it would work better if the various RSS feeds (which can be decided upon at some point, but I'd like PS's feed included, cause it would help pressure me to update it more than once every 6 months!) were combined to one feed and reposted (a-la the "planet" feeds that were all the rage a few years ago, which may still exist but I haven't paid enough attention recently!). but that would hopefully keep things simple and also prioritize news by datestamp rather than letting you see PS's news item from April, which is rather out of date and no one really cares about anymore... ;)

Thanks heaps, ybic
Nic... :)

On 12/11/2010, at 9:07, Chris Little <chrislit at crosswire.org> wrote:

> 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
> 
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