[wp-hackers] A thought about wp-rss2.php

[Roy Schestowitz]

Quoting Luc Saint-Elie <lstelie at gmail.com>:

> 2005/7/1, Roy Schestowitz <r at schestowitz.com>:
>
>> You are right in suggesting that wp-rss2.php is very fragile. 
>> However, if you
>> choose to muck about with it, then you might as well save it under a 
>> different
>> filename, syndicate it for a couple of days and if all goes well,
>> overwrite the  old wp-rss2.php with your experimental revision.
>
> Hello,
>
> In fact I was not calling for personal help, I use a heavily modified
> wp-rss2.php that works pretty well (it must...I'm ranked #3 on the top
> 100 for my national iTunes podcast directory..)
>
> What I wanted to express is that, it would be a great idea to have in
> WP a RSS generation as sophisticated and efficient as the HTML/XHTML
> one.
>
> Today it's not the case.
>
> WP emphasis the ease of use, and is clearly the best in this area as
> long as it comes to http access.
> I think RSS is no more about "syndication" in the meaning this word
> had a few years ago. Today RSS is about basic standard weblog access.
> As I stated in my first message, in my case, RSS represent 50% of my
> weblog access and I'm sure I'm not the only one in this situation.
>
> The fact iTunes has been "enclosures-enabled" is a huge step in this
> direction, as I suppose Microsoft, yahoo, Google and other will do the
> same pretty soon.
>
> My "thought about wp-rss2.php" was in fact that RSS is no more a
> simple and funny extention  to be added to a system intended to
> generate HTML/XHTML but "the other way  to access your content"
> waiting for the day (probably not very far) were for a lot of weblogs
> it will be "the standrad and natural way to access the content".. http
> been just another option..
>
> Luc

I can foresee this heading towards the religious war between supporters of
browsers and supporters of feed readers. Don't forget how you leave 
comments in
blogs and don't forget about bandwidth inflation, which makes those simplified
feeds less necessary. Microsoft geek frogger (Scoble) once suggested 
that feeds
will rule while Ballmer disagreed.

The bottom line is that extending feeds excessively leads to unification of
feeds and full content -- meeting somewhere along the middle if you like. If a
lot of your traffic originated from RSS, is it possible that your Web 
pages are
overly heavy? PalmAddicts, for example, include about 1 MB of pictures in the
front page alone. Would you blame everyone for syndicating? Perhaps a light
version of the site would bridge the gap between feeds and HTML/XHTML.

Roy

-- 
Roy S. Schestowitz
http://Schestowitz.com