My first serious bug after upgrading to the new Oddmuse: The RSS feeds aggregated by “blog planets” are produced by the Oddmuse:Journal RSS Extension. As this extension had a bug, sites like Planet Emacsen, RPG Bloggers and Deutsche Rollenspielblogs carried some bogus entries for a while. Argh.
That brings me to a related question: What should I do about minor changes – should the Journal RSS Extension list them? I have the feeling that it should not. What happens now is that we show the current revision of the page but use the last major revision timestamp. In a blog planet context, the result depends on how the planet works. If it takes the feeds and sorts items by date (pubDate) we’re fine – minor changes to a page will not disrupt the order of items.
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I think that listing the minor changes really depends on what you intend to do with the feed. Obviously, for bloggin you should only ever include new pages in the feed.
– RadomirDopieralski 2008-09-22 08:29 UTC
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Should you? I’m not sure. Maybe a major change deserves to be reintroduced into the feed? We’re working in a continuum between a pure wiki and a pure blog. In a pure blog the person in charge would just write a new entry and not touch the old one. But that’s just a cultural convention; I’m not sure I want to make it mandatory via code (”Code is Law”). The current solution lets the author choose – even though the user interface might be cryptic. Perhaps the correct answer is to improve the user interface.
Note that the user interface on the reading side often has the appropriate options already. Bloglines allows you to either show or suppress updates to old articles.
– Alex Schroeder 2008-09-22 09:00 UTC