Now that we have a fancy new server, please enable RSS feeds. I have done the math in this forum before, and users who use RSS for lurking use less bandwidth than people who read the actual board.
I also offer my services in creating an RSS feed for the main Straight Dope homepage. It would take around two hours of my time and would require zero maintenance and intervention.
Cheers,
When I say services, I do of course mean that I will do it for free, so long as I have the assurance that it will actually be used.
RSS feeds are a vuilt-in feature of vBulletin. No mods necessary.
straightdope.com does not use vBulletin
So there you go.
This isn’t that confusing is it? That’s boards.straightdope.com.
There already is an RSS feed for the main homepage.
I chose not to create a rogue feed because there are obvious legal problems. If the Reader was so inclined, they could send a DMCA takedown notice to anyone republishing their content in such a manner.
Okay, whatever. I’m not familiar with RSS technology beyond what I need to make it work in my RSS reader. I found the feed I mentioned when someone else linked to it on these very boards, if I recall correctly. Carry on with your demands, by all means.
alterego, you’re not making any sense. First you talk about the new server for “the board” and using RSS for “lurking,” but then you seem to be talking about www.straightdope.com, which already has an RSS feed. So which is it?
What are you talking about? He’s making perfect sense. He said “we have a new server” nothing about “the board”. From the OP: “creating an RSS feed for the main Straight Dope homepage”.
Also, if there is already an RSS feed for www.straightdope.com then why didn’t you link it? Unless you mean the one that’s already been linked and alterego mentioned his objections to.
alterego said:
Then elmwood pointed out that vBulletin already supports RSS feeds, and no development work would be necessary, the admins just have to turn it on.
Then alterego said he was talking about the main Straight Dope site (which is and always has been on a separate machine anyway, but that’s beside the point.)
Then MsWhatsit helpfully pointed out that the main Straight Dope site already has an RSS feed:
Subsequently, alterego continued to not make any sense.
I forgot this part. What objections did alterego refer to? The only thing he mentioned is that he did not create his own RSS feed, which seemed to imply that he was unaware of the existing one.
Allowing RSS feeds is a content issue, as it involves the distribution of content and we need express permission from the Reader to do so.
I hope to get such permission after we move to the new server. Until then I don’t want to add to the load on the existing server; that’s why we hadn’t tried going there in the first place except for some testing we did a while back.
Sorry about the confusion. As you can see, I have been asking for RSS feeds since 2004. They were even turned on, once upon a time..
Let me first quantify the savings and value the board will incur by enabling rss feeds. I picked a random forum from the vBulletin.com forums and it’s size is 82K. The rss feed for that forum is 36K. As you can see, this is a 43% savings in bandwidth. But it also saves in CPU cycles, simply because less content must be generated. The TTL (time to live) for that feed is 5 minutes. You might be inclined to think that this is a slippery slope - what if everyone downloaded the rss feed every five minutes? Surely that would cost more in CPU cycles and bandwidth. The catch here is that web-based feed readers are wildly popular, and Google Reader, for example, only downloads the rss feed one time. It then farms it out to every person who has subscribed to it. I should also like to add that it would be trivial for the reader to insert their Google ads into the feeds, using Google AdSense for feeds.
As to the StraightDope Homepage - I enjoy reading Cecil’s columns, and I know a lot of other people do too. And I bet his column would be even more popular if there were an official RSS feed readily linked to on the homepage. And this is yet another monetization opportunity, because you can insert Google ads there also.
So to clarify, I asked that the rss feeds for the board be enabled, and I offered my services in creating a feed for Cecil’s columns. This is a trivial thing for me to do, and I’ve done it many a time. I typically use BeautifulSoup and ScrapeNFeed for this purpose.
OK, I get it now. Thanks for clearing that up.
Got permission to test RSS/XML feeds on the new board.
So go there already and check it out.
I’d break that link, I think. It directs to test.straightdope.com/sdmb/ which doesn’t load. Works fine when cut and pasted though.
Sorry about that, it only takes one keystroke or lack thereof to screw up everything.