Favorites Feed

May 1, 2007 5:20 AM

MeFi has got all kinds of RSS feeds, but there isn't an official feed of the popular favorites page, which would be a great way to filter out the site to the most popular posts.
posted by pithy comment to Feature Requests at 5:20 AM (13 comments total)

It changes (or could change) all the time depending on who adds/removes favorites. How would you deal with that?
posted by juv3nal at 11:56 AM on May 1, 2007

Good question. I don't know. how do sites like Gizmodo and others create such feeds?
posted by pithy comment at 1:42 PM on May 1, 2007

Maybe add an entry every time a new post gets into the top 10. Would be a PITA to implement.

Gizmodo doesn't seem to have a popular favorites feed, does it?
posted by smackfu at 2:46 PM on May 1, 2007

It could be done as a digest feed, every seven days. Snapshot of the current situation at 12:01am Monday morning, perhaps. Not perfect, but it'd track the general thrust of favorite stuff without all the constant repeats.
posted by cortex (staff) at 3:14 PM on May 1, 2007

Is this a good place to ask for feeds by specific users' comments? I know the stalking issue has been raised the the past as a downside, but what about allowing an opt-out (or opt-in) to address that issue?
posted by Mid at 7:48 PM on May 1, 2007

While we're asking for beautiful feed ponies, I know I'd really appreciate a feed of all the comments and posts I mark as "favorite".
posted by Boydrop at 8:41 PM on May 1, 2007

I remember that bash.org once had these neat configurable RSS feeds that would add an item every time a quote went over n points (where n was an arbitrary post of your choosing). I subscribed to one with n=1000 I think, which gave me a pretty decent signal-to-noise ratio. It wouldn't be much of a challenge to do something similar here.

What in the hell ever happened to those bash.org RSS feeds?
posted by Plutor at 4:52 AM on May 2, 2007

Maybe add an entry every time a new post gets into the top 10. Would be a PITA to implement.

No it wouldn't. The way RSS works, you never have to explicitly add or remove entries. Matt would just have to do whatever query generates the current HTML page, but output it as XML instead.
posted by cillit bang at 5:38 AM on May 2, 2007

but output it as XML instead.

Yeah.

Also, I don't understand the problem with the items not being static. Most feedreaders can handle item updates, no?
posted by and hosted from Uranus at 6:41 AM on May 2, 2007

Also, I don't understand the problem with the items not being static. Most feedreaders can handle item updates, no?

Adding things yes, removing things, I don't think so otherwise I shouldn't be seeing feed items that point to deleted posts, right?
posted by juv3nal at 10:07 AM on May 2, 2007

Basically RSS just provides a list of items that are "current", and it's up to the reader to reconcile that with the list of current items that was there last time and do something sensible. There's no mechanism to explicitly remove an item other than no longer including it in the feed, which some readers have a mechanism to show, and some don't.

But there are plenty of existing feeds of top 10 lists and so on, so I don't see the problem.
posted by cillit bang at 12:22 PM on May 2, 2007

isn't this something that could be just re-generated on the hour with a cron job? it should be ever changing, that's the point, right? It is not a straight-forward timeline progression, like a blog archive. it's a dynamic list.
posted by Hackworth at 11:13 AM on May 4, 2007

but as I understand it, how most readers work is they poll, check date and if the date is newer, they show the item. If you regenerate the list, then people are going to see a lot of duplicates, no?
posted by juv3nal at 3:18 PM on May 4, 2007