For DT's Webmaster: phpbb RSS feed

Miscellaneous DEVONtechnologies
21

It also fails in Safari 2 and in the RSS reader built into the open source app suite eGroupWare, which I use to read many other feeds.

22

Same with latest edition of NetNewsWire (20b10).

Best,
Alex.

23

The issue should be fixed now.

24

Yes, it’s fixed. Thank you.

25

This may be a dumb question (since I just learned all about RSS) but I am wondering about Atom feeds. Several sites I visit offer both RSS and Atom syndication.

I also wanted to suggest you update the “Forum Page” to add that you can read RSS feeds with DA 1.5 and Mozilla. (By adding Mozilla, you’ve got two free RSS readers on the page to hold people over until DTPro, DA 1.5, and Safari 2.0 finally show up.)

26

The difference has to do mostly with turf wars. I don’t think there’s an obvious benefit of one over the other for the normal user. NNW parses both just fine.

And while I’m here, thank you, Eric & Christian. This stopped working a few weeks ago and I didn’t want to say anything because it’s not exactly critical path for you, but now that it’s back I really appreciate the effort.

27

Good idea. I’ve just added this to the Forum page.

Best,

Eric.

28

Thanks for the RSS feed. Any chance of making it full posts rather than making me visit the site to read the full post?

29

I’ll have a look at it, but I can’t promise anything.

Best,

Eric.

30

Thanks. It’s definitely possible. I have the same setup (phpBB and RSS feeds) and they are full post feeds.

31

Which RSS module do you use? I’m not a PHP programmer.

Best,

Eric.

32

phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=144548

It’s been a while since I installed it but I’d be happy to dig in again if you need some help implementing it here.

33

Did it myself. I’ve removed the length restriction. Use the following URL

devon-technologies.com/phpBB … hars=10000

Modify the “chars” parameter to whatever maximum posting length you need. 10000 should be a good value when you want always the whole postings in the feed.

Best,

Eric.

34

Thank you!

35

Greetings. In the latest NetNewsWire 2.0 beta, I was experimenting (foolishly, in hindsight) with the length restriction URL for the feed and discovered this important information was missing from newly-downloaded posts:

Author: admin
Subject: RDF/RSS feed with variable maximum posting length
Posted: Tue Mar 15, 2005 8:31 pm (GMT 1)
Topic Replies: 0

All that’s visible now are the generic From and a Date, like:

From: DEVONtechnologies User Forum
Date: 03/15/2005 09:54

Reverting to the default feed URL may not have fixed it, but creating a new feed with the default URL collected the full posts again. I’ll need to wait a bit for more posts to show up to see if the original looks okay, too. I don’t want to remove it and recreate it from scratch because I’d lose all my flagged items.

I’m not sure it matters, but the default feed uses “c=25” and Eric’s example uses “count=25”.

Maybe someone understands what the trouble is? My bad for not testing with a fresh feed entry instead of messing with the original.

36

A few more feed-related issues, while I’m thinking about them …

Would it be possible to have separate feeds for each subforum? Or provide feed info that differentiates which subforum a post is made in? Right now the feed is a rather jumbled hodgepodge of posts that I can’t sort into any logical order.

And how often should the feed be refreshed to keep up with all posts? Is there some expiration value you can set at the site end so if I go a few days without refreshing I can still grab older posts? Related to that, I often get duplicates if I refresh what’s apparently too often. I don’t know if that’s a problem on my end or some sort of bug with the feed’s “availability”.

Thanks for any help to get this running more smoothly!

37

Which feed do you use, the old RSS or the new RDF one?

In fact, the RDF feed I am talking about only delivers title, link and description, no from, no date. I will shutdown the RSS feed anyway very soon and replace it with a copy of the RDF feed.

Best,

Eric.

38

I’ve been using the old RSS feed with the style I prefer:

http://www.devon-technologies.com/phpBB2/rss.php?c=25

Ahh, that explains the snafu I described earlier. I tested the newer RDF feed with:

http://www.devon-technologies.com/phpBB2/rdf.php?count=25&chars=10000

And I’d even half-noticed the rss vs. rdf difference at the time, d’oh! Thanks for filling in the other half. :slight_smile:

Won’t that be a downgrade if the RDF feed doesn’t include the Author, Posted, and Topic Replies info like the current RSS feed? That’s very important to me for identification purposes and I’d hate to lose it… probably enough to stop using the feed. :frowning: Is there a good reason for excluding it?

39

The only reason is that I am a bad PHP programmer :wink:

I’ll have a look at it and when I find a way to include more “metadata”, I will.

Best,

Eric.

40

Not bad, just inexperienced? :slight_smile:

I’ve just started dabbling in PHP, motivated by interest in tweaking my wannabe WordPress weblog.

Could the RSS feed remain at least until you’ve looking into enhancing the RDF feed?

Any feedback re: optimal feed refresh frequency and duplicates? Maybe the RDF feed fixes the dups problem?

Thanks, Eric!