(For everything that follows, keep in mind that I’ve only dabbled in RSS, having written a few screen-scraper type syndicators of sites I was interested in that didn’t offer their own feeds)

At first blush it seems like a good fit, but it seems that if you’re trying to do something close to real-time rankings you’re going to have a “new” (which would mostly just mean slightly reordered) feed every couple of minutes, which means that every aggregator that pulls down every ten minutes will always be getting a new feed from you… I hope you’re not planning on including the entire post in each entry? Or you have a sufficiently fat pipe?

Also, some RSS readers (NetNewsWire for the Mac leaps to mind) won’t necessarily reorder if the item (title/link/whatever) stays the same even if its position in the RSS feed changes. That might be contrary to spec, though. This also might not be a problem if you’re offering the “top X” as a group rather than an ordered list.

Of course, having said that, a) I might be missing something in the 2.0 spec that handles just such cases as this; and b) it sounds like fun! Sign me up, if you actually need more help than has already been offered.

I’m always open to alternate solutions. I’ve gotten pretty far in tech by admitting I don’t know everything
> (For everything that follows, keep in mind that I’ve only dabbled in RSS,
> having written a few screen-scraper type syndicators of sites I was
> interested in that didn’t offer their own feeds)
>
> At first blush it seems like a good fit, but it seems that if you’re
> trying to do something close to real-time rankings you’re going to have a
> “new” (which would mostly just mean slightly reordered) feed every couple
> of minutes, which means that every aggregator that pulls down every ten
> minutes will always be getting a new feed from you… I hope you’re not
> planning on including the entire post in each entry? Or you have a
> sufficiently fat pipe?

Good point. I was planning more on abstracts rather than entire posts. Maybe first 50 words or so.

Also, the XML/RSS feed would not be dynamic (at least that wasn’t my thinking). It would publish a static page once an hour or so (via cron). So people who are checking every 10 minutes will get a “Not changed” and shouldn’t re-fetch the page (if they actually respect the http protocol). If push comes to shove you can always throttle connections with an Apache module to keep the bandwidth suckers from causing too much grief.

>
> Also, some RSS readers (NetNewsWire for the Mac leaps to mind) won’t
> necessarily reorder if the item (title/link/whatever) stays the same even
> if its position in the RSS feed changes. That might be contrary to spec,
> though. This also might not be a problem if you’re offering the “top X”
> as a group rather than an ordered list.

In regards to my previous statement above, I view this more of an annoyance than anything else. Also, not all RSS readers handle this in a consistent manner so . . . not much I can do about that.

>
> Of course, having said that, a) I might be missing something in the 2.0
> spec that handles just such cases as this; and b) it sounds like fun!
> Sign me up, if you actually need more help than has already been offered.
>

I’ll keep you on the list! Thanks!

Bob
thedegenerategambler.com

Yours,
Dave and the Farmer Boys.
xxx

BTW, I’m now PHP savvy
I see you already got a bunch of people that said they’d help, but I’m just letting you know I’m here in the case you need
Bloggers r a geekie bunch, eh? -grin-

Wait.. can I put in more net-speak?
Hmmm, ah, next time :p

~Glenn