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Pandemonium
New Member
United States
26 posts
Joined: Sep, 2001
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 Posted - 2005/12/06 : 06:40:13
Any chance of an RSS feed for the mainpage news items?
Sure would be handy!
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silver
Admin
Japan
12,564 posts
Joined: Feb, 2001
894 hardcore releases
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 Posted - 2005/12/06 : 11:23:15
I have looked in to this but besides other sites displaying our news what are the practial uses for this?
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Pandemonium
New Member
United States
26 posts
Joined: Sep, 2001
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Posted - 2005/12/06 : 18:48:49
The practical use is that an RSS feed can be used to agregate data and news from many many websites into one place, making it more manageable and less time-consuming to check up on things. There are many RSS feed readers out there, though I personally just use Google's Personalized Homepage thingy. Other people use more powerful RSS readers that let them organize things even further. You can see a screenshot of how I have it set up here:
http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/4918/screenshot9tf.jpg
I only started using this a couple weeks ago, so I don't have an awful lot of RSS feeds going at once. But, the practical implication is that it's extremely easy for me to check up on many of the sites that I like to keep up with daily. Instead of needing to go around to each one of them to read their news items, I can just hit my google homepage and see right away if there are any new headlines, podcasts, blog entries, etc. If I'm interested in a headline, I click the link and am taken straight to the item.
For me, it's been a big timesaver, and allows me to keep up with things much easier. I'd love it if every site I visited had an RSS feed.
There's some good general information on RSS on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(protocol)
I've never made an RSS feed, but I googled it and found this article on making them by hand:
http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/2175271
And this page where you plug in all the information and it outputs the text that you can save as the RSS feed file:
http://www.webdevtips.com/webdevtips/codegen/rss.shtml
I'm sure there are tons of other utilities and things out there for creating them, as well as scripts to do it all automagically server-side, this is just when I came up with from a quick google.
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Edited by - Pandemonium on 2005/12/06 19:01:46 |
whispering
Moderator
Finland
8,453 posts
Joined: Nov, 2002
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Posted - 2005/12/06 : 19:29:36
I have also asked for this in the past. I use the RSS reader thats in Opera as default. Personally i would just want to know about all new topics, without using "active topics" or "recent topics".
I think it works great on Opera, when the site has RSS feed, there comes a small RSS icon on the address bar, and by clicking that can join the channel. E.g. BBC news looks like that ->
[URL="http://img208.imageshack.us/my.php?image=untitled3kk.jpg"] [/URL]
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Edited by - whispering on 2005/12/06 19:35:14 |
silver
Admin
Japan
12,564 posts
Joined: Feb, 2001
894 hardcore releases
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Posted - 2005/12/07 : 02:48:13
It's cool and all, but it seems it just stops people visiting the site?
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Pandemonium
New Member
United States
26 posts
Joined: Sep, 2001
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Posted - 2005/12/07 : 21:28:51
I don't see why it would. All you see in the RSS feed is the headline - or post subject if it's an RSS feed of the forums. Clicking on the headline brings you to that news item/forum post here on the site. They still have to click through in order to read anything beyond the headline. I still frequently visit the sites for which I subscribe to the feed, I'm just better able to keep track of what's going on there.
The only time I can think that an RSS feed would have a negative effect on the amount of visitors you get would be if there isn't anything new or interesting on the site. They'd be able to see it from the RSS feed, and therefore have no reason to click through to the site. Whereas, without a feed they still have to visit the site to find out there's nothing here they want. But, if you never have anything new or interesting, people wouldn't keep visiting for very long, so I don't see how this is any different.
Would it be a lot of work to throw up a feed for a couple weeks and see what the response is?
One other place that would really be nice to have a feed would be in the shop, so people can automatically be updated about new releases, and then they can just click through and buy the item. Now, that'd be handy...
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silver
Admin
Japan
12,564 posts
Joined: Feb, 2001
894 hardcore releases
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Posted - 2005/12/08 : 07:57:40
Yeah I can see your point, still need a programmer to help me complete it as I'm way to busy at the moment.
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Pandemonium
New Member
United States
26 posts
Joined: Sep, 2001
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Posted - 2005/12/12 : 00:58:18
Can't help there... :-(
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Woxxy
Junior Member
Sweden
142 posts
Joined: Oct, 2002
36 hardcore releases
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Posted - 2006/02/24 : 07:26:02
I agree, an RSS-feed would be great to have.
I use thunderbird to read RSS-feeds several times a day.
There are free ones available for download, you just have to upload them and install them.
regarding other sites stealing your news; if there's a will, there's a way. anyone with a bit of knowledge in web-programming could easily parse the first page and steal the news, so that's really not an argument.
The sites will not get less visits. It's the opposite, I believe.
Say one reader reads the news (that's one visit the site will have), he wants to talk about it with some of the folks here (another hit) he posts his message (another hit) he looks around in the forums to see if anything else has been poster (a few more hits).
I really don't see how this could be negative for the growth of this site.
as for me, i don't come here very often anymore, but i still want the news. if there was an rss feed, i'd be here much more often.
http://www.2rss.com/software.php#rss20
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