New! RSS-2 'full' content feeds with filecasting / podcasting
07-September-2005
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- KNotations
- SIGOSSEE Project News
Those who follow this blog know that we've been planning to expand the range and features of the syndication feeds from Knotes content. The biggest priorities were:
- filecasting ('podcasting'... doc-casting)
- - delivering file attachments as enclosures ready to download directly from a news reader. In the case of audio or video files, this is usually called 'podcasting'
- 'full' content feed
- Many users now prefer to experience web content almost exclusively through their newsreader of choice; not only reading content without viewing it in a browser, but also invoking editors to bookmark or blog about that content without viewing it on the web. To accomodate this growing preference, many blog publishers now offer 'full content' feeds. In the case of KNotes content, which has a lead-in/summary, main body text and extended-text, we would assume that the extended text should be excluded from 'full' content in feeds, just as it is in our aggregate web views - we'll call this 'full-minus-extended-text' the "main content" of an entry.
- RSS 2 support
- KNotes has supported RSS 1 and atom formats from its content. We have never wanted to appear to take sides in the atom-vs-RSS contention, but supporting only RSS 1 and atom coiukd appear to be implicit support for atom as the format for future features, since RSS 1 is ad old format. RSS 2 is the RSS format being developed in the near future and includes many useful features which our feeds have not yet supported - we wanted to include support for RSS 2 from KNotes, and begin to explore support for the new features in it.
On the other hand, we want to avoid a confusing proliferation of choice about which feed a user might subscribe to. We already have a choice whether to 'include_discussion', anfd a choice between atom and RSS-1 - making 4 choices in all - if we delivered the complete range of RSS-1,RSS-2,atom X include_discussion X full-content,main-content,summary we would be giving users a choice of 18 feeds :o{
So we've decided that the RSS 2 feed will be 'the' main-content feed and 'the' filecasting feed. In future we might add these features to the atom feed (which is now beginning to feel featureless :o)
As yet, the RSS_2.xml feed does not support the include_discussion search argument, so is only available for level-one content. We'll add support for include_discussion later today, an then put links into the Subscribe sidebar to expose the new RSS 2 filecasting main-content feed to end users. It displays the lead-in anf the html main body, with enclosures for any file attachments in the entry. If there is extended text, this is clearly flagged at the top an bottom of the feed item (for instance "View full content (18405 bytes more)". See the screenshot.
In the meantime, you can get a feel for the new format either by appending '/RSS_2.xml' to a KNotes weblog url, or by trying one of these:
- SIGOSSEE Project News [main content + filecasts]
- KNotations [main content + filecasts]
Some policy decisions remain to be made - for instance, which of the formats should be the 'one' auto-discoverable feed which we link to from the header? I am inclined to think that the new RSS2 feed ought to be the 'one' that users subscribe to when they click the RSS button in safari, etc. We'll get back to that question later :o)
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