/rss [LWN.net]

/rss

Posted Apr 30, 2009 19:36 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1)
In reply to: /rss by paulj
Parent article: A couple of new LWN features

The main RSS feed is in the HTML metatags, and it does appear in the Firefox URL bar. I'm not quite sure where to put the other feeds; I guess the comments feed could go on pages under /Comments.

Per-article RSS feeds have a couple of practical problems. One is simply server load; we'd go from one cached feed to potentially thousands of uncached ones. And I have this real fear of the server collapsing under the load of thousands of feeds attached to articles which haven't seen comments in years.

I've pondered an alternative: a single per-reader RSS feed where each reader could flag specific articles for inclusion. That would mix the comments from various articles, but it would eliminate the need to deal with lots of different feeds, which should make life easier for readers too.

The "email notifications for any comments on this article" idea will happen at some point. The biggest obstacle there is just usability issues; I worry that adding more buttons to every article risks making site harder to deal with. It just needs some thought.

to post comments

/rss

Posted Apr 30, 2009 23:50 UTC (Thu) by knobunc (guest, #4678) [Link] (1 responses)

Thanks for the feedback. I'd love a customizable feed... The real win of the per-thread one would be grouping of related comments, but I should take that up with my feed reader (BlogBridge) I suppose.

BTW where does the "your unread comments" page actually get linked to on the site?

Thanks, -ben

/rss

Posted May 1, 2009 1:44 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

> BTW where does the "your unread comments" page actually get linked to on the site?

It's in the FAQ but not in too many other places. The site navigation needs some thought, I know; we have a lot of things to link to.