LFPF RSS Feed

[robc]

Finally installed an RSS reader and boy does it make keeping up todate with forum messages easy.
Just out of interest, how does the feed work, i.e. is it date driven such as one or two days worth or is it some arbitrary number of messages that get fed.

[Tom Westbrook]

The feed gives you the 15 most recent posts at the time your reader fetches an update. You configure your reader to fetch at whatever rate you want, but 15 min is the minimum recommended frequency to avoid excessive network loads for our provider (who is good enough to give us this home for free, so its wise to play nice). If people wanted it, I could add a separate feed that only tracks new threads without all the replies for those who look less frequently or wanted fewer updates. You can vote here or email the moderator address at the bottom of the page if that's something enough people want (it wouldn't be very hard to do, but don't want to spend the time if its not going to be used).

[Janko Belaj]

Tom, I haven't been looking at your feeds for some time, and now I can see some giant lag in my reader (Safari) - between "Yesterday, 04:05 PM" and "Nov 11, 02:24 PM" were no posts? I know there was a lot of them, just wondering is that is some cache problem on my side, or you didn't generated feeds in that period, or is problem somewhere else?

[Tom Westbrook]

Different readers do different things, but I'd guess it was just old data cached in your reader. There is probably an option to delete old stuff. The feed only send the latest 15 posts--it doesn't send anything older than that.

[Paul Kierstead]

15? I always see 20....

But I would *really* like to have more. About double might be right. 20 never covers it if you check only once, or even twice a day.

The RSS feed is great!

[robc]

Thanks Tom,

I'm not sure a feed of only new threads would be of benefit to me. What I like about the current feed is that it tells me which threads have been posted to. Infact, ideally, a feed which lists just the threads(not individual posts) which have been posted to in the last 48 hours would be great. That way you could just link to those threads and you can see whats been posted. The number of active threads is not great so I don't think it would generate a large xml feed file. I'm just thinking aloud here so its just a nice to have kind of request rather than a must have type.

thanks

[Tom Westbrook]

You're right, Paul, it is 20--I was looking at the wrong data. We'll have to see how 40 works. Have you tried photo.net's feeds with probably at least 40 items? Its very slow to load, but maybe thats just that their servers are much busier than ours... I can try it to see what happens, but if Brian Reid (the landlord) shows up and kicks in the door wondering WTF, I'm blaming you ;)

Rob, that may be doable, but I'd want to cap it at some reasonable number for safety (probably match the above count). Actaully, that would basically be an XML version of this (http://www.largeformatphotography.info/lfforum/recent.php).

Good ideas, guys.

[Ken Lee]

If you install the Wizz RSS Reader as an extension to the Firefox browser, it wants a URL for this forum

The URL to use is http://www.largeformatphotography.info/lfforum/rss.php

[robc]

Tom,

Yes that list is exactly what I meant. I think 40 would do it.

ps the cuurent feed now seems to produce 40 posts but in the top there is a piece of code which says:

ttl 15 /ttl

[robc]

ignore that last bit about ttl 15. I just looked at the spec and see that I completely misinterpreted it.