February 20, 2006

RSS aggregator developers - please note

Lee Hopkins wrote this 11:01 pm:

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. You can even subscribe by email! Thanks for visiting!

Mrs BetterComms lets Mr BetterComms know about the small thing that has become more and more annoying to her

As Mrs BetterComms says, it’s only a small thing, but a small thing that is becoming increasingly frustrating.

I usually read my feeds first thing in the morning, on the way to client offices in my chauffer-driven Volvo (aka ‘bus’). When I view my aggregator feeds and find a post I want to blog about, I have to actually fire up a web connection and meander over to the blogpost in question to find two things:

  1. A non-feedburner permalink (not so essential but nice to have)
  2. A trackback uri.

There is currently no way to view those trackback codes in my aggregator, making it a lot of steps harder to let the author know I have continued the conversation. Very frustrating.

Can the software developers on the blogging platforms and aggregators fix this? Please?

Stumble it!

* Filed under: miscellaneous

 

10 Responses to “RSS aggregator developers - please note”

  1. Dan Hill Says:
    February 21st, 2006 at 8:19 pm

    Lee, I hear you on the trackback issue. Pinging is not the most straightforward activity in the world, in my case, having to have three websites open in the browser to do it.

    But I have the horrible feeling they may have been left out of aggregators to avoid spam.

  2. Lee Says:
    February 22nd, 2006 at 8:43 am

    I fear you may be right, Dan. But HOW annoying is it?!!

  3. Dan Hill Says:
    February 22nd, 2006 at 9:56 am

    Oh, isn’t it just.

    Maybe a permission filter for the originating author could be thrown in.

    Something like:

    Dear blogger, Mr Hopkins at leehopkins.net has subscribed to your blog. Do you wish to allow this person to view your trackback URIs with this feed?

  4. Lee Says:
    February 22nd, 2006 at 11:03 am

    Excellent idea — what I’ll do is include Jack from CurioStudio (GreatNews reader) in on this thread and see what his views are.

  5. Jack Says:
    February 22nd, 2006 at 12:47 pm

    Lee, feedburner does include orginal permlink in . I don’t know any reader using it so far, but it’s fairly easy to support it. The trackback uri is much hard to handle though. Unless someone comes up with an extension, the uri is not included in rss feed.

  6. Jack Says:
    February 22nd, 2006 at 12:49 pm

    sorry. the feedburner element name was filtered. it’s <feedburner:origLink>

  7. Lee Says:
    February 22nd, 2006 at 2:16 pm

    So Jack, are there any plans over at GreatNews to include the origLink element? Do you guys have any ‘in’ with Feedburner or blogging platform developers to offer a trackback element?

  8. Jack Says:
    February 23rd, 2006 at 12:40 pm

    I guess it would be useful to have a global option in GreatNews so that feeds from feedburner will store their original links instead of feedburner’s. As for the trackback uri, FeedBurner probably won’t be able to solve it alone, because the oringal rss feeds don’t have trackback uri in the first place. To solve this problem we would have to extend rss spec, or introduce some widely acceptable extension. Randy Charles Morin, who is on RSS advisory board, sent me an email a couple of days ago about feedbacks on RSS 2.0.2 spec. I think that’s a pretty good place to request this extension.
    Spec: http://www.rssboard.org/rss-draft-1
    Group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-public/

  9. Jack Says:
    February 23rd, 2006 at 12:45 pm

    I just found there’s already an extension for trackbacks. The spec is available here: http://madskills.com/public/xml/rss/module/trackback/

  10. Lee Says:
    February 24th, 2006 at 9:03 am

    Hey Jack,

    Amazing work, mate — thanks! Now I just have to get WP developers to incorporate it into feeds. We may crack this yet!!

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