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List:       opensolaris-website-discuss
Subject:    [website-discuss] RFE: RSS feed for forum search results
From:       Manpreet.Singh () Sun ! COM (Manpreet Singh)
Date:       2006-04-17 10:46:51
Message-ID: 4443D449.3080004 () sun ! com
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Thus spake Stephen Hahn:
> * Manpreet Singh <Manpreet.Singh@Sun.COM> [2006-04-13 16:45]:
>> It would be very useful if the search results for forum searches could
>> also be made available in an RSS feed ala Feedster. Some general
>> topics like DSCM etc. are discussed in multiple forums and without
>> such a feature it is all but impossible to track them without somehow
>> constantly manually updated *all* alias subscriptions and client side
>> filtering.
> 
>   1.  The bug category is opensolaris/website.  If you don't have an
>       internal Bugster account, use bugs.opensolaris.org.
> 

Sure, I'll file an RFE.

>   2.  Surely you could prototype this feature with cron(1M) and a web
>       scraper to see how useful it actually is?  To solve the problem in
>       general as part of the site is a reasonable amount of work off
>       distant from our critical path.  Each requested feed is either a
>       subscription that must be revisited on an event-driven basis,
>       potentially initiated by more than one user, or a search request
>       driven by the frequency of requests by the various RSS clients on
>       a particular URL.  (In fact, if you view it as the latter, your
>       cron/scraper combined with an httpd server is sufficient to do the
>       whole feature...)
> 
>   - Stephen
>   

I don't doubt the utility of this as I already use such features in my 
news readers.

I could prototype it to satisfy others' curiosity but a few other 
limitations prevent this from working. Currently, the RSS feed does not 
contain full post text and this has been requested elsewhere. This alone 
defeats scraping RSS. For the sake of prototyping I could scrape the 
forum pages but the other bug of forum not getting updated would prevent 
me from trying that. Also if people started scraping, that would 
increase the load on the site dramatically.

For detecting new feeds, I believe it should be easy to provide an OPML
feed since the infrastructure seems to be already in place.

http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/rss.jspa?feed=rss/rssmessages.jspa?categoryID=1

which news readers like BlogBridge can use easily and provide this 
feature with ease.

As a poor man's implementation, I could scrape the search result page
but that's not the solution.

-manpreet

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