[sword-devel] RSS feeds and news page

Greg Hellings greg.hellings at gmail.com
Thu Nov 11 16:09:36 MST 2010


I have had some success in the past with manipulating RSS feeds in
JavaScript and certainly know my way around widgetizing a website.

I could pretty quickly whip up a few client-side modifications to the page
if we want. The whole aggragate feed could be dynamically pulled and
assembled, including only the feeds the user wanted, or we could keep the
individual feeds and allow users to rearrange and hide the ones they don't
want.

None of that is too difficult to work up, and I've done most of it before.

--Greg
On Nov 11, 2010 5:02 PM, "Nic Carter" <niccarter at mac.com> wrote:
> 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you see PS's news item from April, which is rather out of date and no one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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