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This is the comment you were replying to, attached to the weblog Aggregating external articles
#6 Re: Aggregating external articles Posted by Steve (62.30.xx.xx) on Mon 12 Mar 2007 at 21:00 I haven't had time to think about this sufficintly yet, but I did want to make one quick comment before I forgot. The most obvious problem I see with this is the nature of RSS feeds. (Mostly for article importing, but the same thing applies for importing weblog entries too). Typically an RSS feed will list the most recent N "things". (eg. Most recent 10 weblog entries, most recent 10 articles, etc). This causes an immediate problem in accepting a single article from an external source, you need two identifiers: The RSS/Atom/XML feed URI. The reference to the specific entry within it. (The "permalink"/"guid") I could imaging updating the article table to include those two details and every few hours post-accept it could pull the feed, and extract the entry - updating the published article if changed. But this would mean that the site-specific facilities would no longer work. It would be wrong to use the "edit weblog" entry to edit a specific entry if that were to be overwritten in the future. Ditto for articles. I guess those aren't major problems. But since there would still be the overhead of parsing the feeds every 6/12/24 hours until the permalink'd entry fell off the RSS feed to check for changes, and the owner would still end up with two sources of discussion - comments on the origianl (if supported by the publishing platform) and comments here. I think I'm not convinced of the benefit of supporting it. One thing I do want to support is the acceptance of submissions via PGP-signed emails - that is something I'm actively going to work on once this site is upgraded to Etch. (Ditto for PGP-signed notification mails) I guess it isn't a bad idea, but with the approval for articles, the problems with finding the entry, and general overhead of mixing distinct types of content it gets tricky fast. For weblogs I think the case is much simpler to make, and the code becomes simpler: Poll the feed If there is an entry with a permalink/GUID we already have for the user then we update the text. If not we add a new entry. No approval, and the reporting issue works just as well as it did in the past. Steve
I haven't had time to think about this sufficintly yet, but I did want to make one quick comment before I forgot.
The most obvious problem I see with this is the nature of RSS feeds. (Mostly for article importing, but the same thing applies for importing weblog entries too).
Typically an RSS feed will list the most recent N "things". (eg. Most recent 10 weblog entries, most recent 10 articles, etc).
This causes an immediate problem in accepting a single article from an external source, you need two identifiers:
I could imaging updating the article table to include those two details and every few hours post-accept it could pull the feed, and extract the entry - updating the published article if changed.
But this would mean that the site-specific facilities would no longer work. It would be wrong to use the "edit weblog" entry to edit a specific entry if that were to be overwritten in the future. Ditto for articles.
I guess those aren't major problems.
But since there would still be the overhead of parsing the feeds every 6/12/24 hours until the permalink'd entry fell off the RSS feed to check for changes, and the owner would still end up with two sources of discussion - comments on the origianl (if supported by the publishing platform) and comments here.
I think I'm not convinced of the benefit of supporting it.
One thing I do want to support is the acceptance of submissions via PGP-signed emails - that is something I'm actively going to work on once this site is upgraded to Etch. (Ditto for PGP-signed notification mails)
I guess it isn't a bad idea, but with the approval for articles, the problems with finding the entry, and general overhead of mixing distinct types of content it gets tricky fast.
For weblogs I think the case is much simpler to make, and the code becomes simpler:
No approval, and the reporting issue works just as well as it did in the past.
Steve
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