[mb-devel] Possibility of Implementing RSS Feeds for Artist Edits

[Simon Reinhardt]

> I've been thinking about subscribed edits and it really annoys me
> having to open up 30 links every morning from an email and I was
> wondering if it would be possible (before I bring it up with MB_Users
> to see if people are interested) to create RSS feeds for each artists
> edits.

Hmm.. aggregating them would be a lot of work - either you use something like Pipes to merge them or do that in your feed reader if it has something like that (mine doesn't). So unlike you would want to combine different edit type feeds for different artists, I think feeds for artists themselves wouldn't be necessary if you had a feed for your subscribed artists.

> It would be *very* cool if we
> could vote from within an RSS reader, is that even possible?

If your feed reader can display websites and can have you logged into them, sure.


> It would also be neat if in addition to individual artist RSS feeds we
> could have a feed for Subscribed Artists.  Might also be cool to have
> feeds for each type of open edit so they can be browsed.

Ok, this is for feeds in general now: I see two issues.

First, while the simplicity of RSS helped feeds gain popularity, it also has a major drawback: performance. The fact that a single server gets hit by tons of requests checking for updates where there are none makes it suboptimal compared to systems where more servers get polled by fewer people each (like email or newsgroups). Compared to our current system I'm not sure which would be better, I guess only tests could reveal that. On the one hand you have the server sending of tons of emails once at a certain time each day, many of them which aren't read. On the other hand you have people polling the server with the requests being distributed over the day - but in case of badly configured readers you probably have people polling it every hour or even every ten minutes.

Second, the subscription emails have a certain purpose: to get people to vote. Therefore they must draw people's attention to edits - and therefore I prefer the active sending of emails instead of passively waiting for people to subscribe to feeds.

Hope this makes sense. :)

Simon (Shepard)
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