Our RSS Feeds Rock the House

In House | greta, June 22nd, 2007

Very exciting news. Nick Allen, our whirlwind of a web intern, knows how to CODE THINGS. This means he can make small improvements to the current site, tiding us over until we do our big redesign.

From Nick, on his first conquest:

Today I’ve been putting the polish to our Comments RSS Feed by adding the show title to each feed item. Now you can easily keep up with the most recent conversation on our site from your favorite reader.

Nick Allen, June 21, 2007

RSS feeds collect all of the new information that’s posted on a site and deliver it to an RSS feed reader for you. In this office, we all have Bloglines accounts, but you can try Google Reader or Live Bookmarks and see which you like best. You can tell your reader to collect new posts from all your favorite daily reads on the web.

You can also restrict your RSS subscription so that the reader gathers only certain kinds of posts from those sites. On our site, you can subscribe to a feed that sends you all new posts to the site, or a feed that sends you every new comment posted on any thread, or one that sends any new comment posted to a specific thread. You can even subscribe to a feed of links to articles we’re reading in preparation for upcoming shows, or a feed of new photos tagged “radioopensource” on Flickr.

The catch: until this morning, the feed that collected every new comment posted to any thread was pretty worthless. It sent the text of the comment and the commenter’s name, but it didn’t tell you which thread it was posted to. Everything was out of context and very hard to follow.

Today, Nick went in with his nimble little coder fingers and fixed all that.

Here’s what the comments feed looks like in Bloglines now:

Essentially, it works like a “display all unread comments” feature, which Allison and others have been hankering for for a while now, and now it tells you which thread each comment comes from.

It also means that new comments to old threads, which have often gone unnoticed in the past, can now get just as much attention as new comments to new threads. Now you have a much better chance of re-igniting that discussion on coltan mining, or dystopia, or potatoes. Every comment gets more time in the sun.

So to subscribe to any of our feeds (or just to catch up on the action every now and then), click on any of those orange boxes at the bottom of the right column.

This one: shows all new posts.

This one: shows all new comments.

This one: shows all new podcasts.

This one: shows links to articles we’re reading.

This one: shows new photos tagged “radioopensource” on Flickr.

So what should Nick do next? Here’s another note from him:

While I’m here this summer, I’m going to be working on other small improvements to the website. Big changes like editable comments and show topic tag clouds will have to wait until the redesign, but I’ll do what I can and I’ll let you know what I can’t. So write in and tell us what you would like to see on the Open Source website.

Nick Allen, June 21, 2007