Thanks for your detailed answer.
A couple of things based on your answers.
You mention differences between RSS feeds that are for feed aggregators and programatic syndication, i assume that the later covers sites such as google news and newsnow.co.uk. To cope with these differences i assume it is best to have separate RSS feeds from Farcry tailored to each type. What differences do the news websites need?
I have not found a way to restrict the number of news items, i have tried setting the numbers to items in the RSS feed, but this does not have any effect on the XML produced. I have searched for numberofitems and found it referenced in start.cfm in the _dmXMLExport and the property in dmXMLExport.cfc am I missing something.
You mention routines to convert non-XML entities, is this the HTMLStripper()? If so this only works on the body and not the teaser. The problem I had was some quotes were copied from MS Word directly into the teaser - the RSS Validator objected to these characters - once i retyped them in the teaser everything was OK.
I would be interested in finding out more about the template mechanism already set up, as far as i can see it is coded in generate.cfm to get the teaser or the first 255 characters of the body if the teaser does not exist.
Thanks for your comments and support, Chris.
Geoff Bowers wrote:
Chris,
I run Fullasagoog.com so I'm involved with a lot of RSS feeds.
Many of the questions you asked depend entirely on your intended audience. So I'll assume its the average man in the street with a feed aggregator rather than some sort of programatic syndication.
Chris Kent wrote:
First site will have probably 1 to 2 news items added each day (max) Second site will have 20-30 news items added each day
For the second site you should seriously consider splitting your feed into several categories. 20-30 items daily is too much for non-machine solutions to handle.
Here are some quick questions, but if there is anything else that would be useful please let me know
What is the best number for max Number of Items?
Typically users poll your site for updates. The only way they know of a change is to download the entire feed and compare it to what they have locally. If your feed is popular you may need to make this smaller to reduce bandwidth.
Fullasagoog.com re-publishes feeds with 30 or 50 item options. I think 30 is a good number of items -- but it's not an exact science.
What is the update frequency? What effect does the update base date have?
Few authors use these properly, so few systems bother to deal with them. Set up your update frequency to the approx period you update the feed. It might (depending on the sophistication of the RSS reader) mean clients set to poll your feed at that interval.
I am assuming that I can make dmXMLExport a custom type and modify _dmXMLExport/generate.cfm to tailor the content that is selected to go in the feed.
Actually there is a template mechanism already set up -- so you shouldn't have to extend the type. It's similar to display methods -- I'll let Brendan elaborate.
One thing I have found is that my feeds did not validate initially, this was simply down to characters that had been cut and pasted into the teaser. I will probably try to resolve this by putting some REReplace() in the _dmXMLExport/generate.cfm
Hmm.. again don't be in a hurry to update core. The XML feed is strict about what goes into it -- like most XML. There should already be some routines to convert non-XML entities, although they may not be comprehensive enough. If there is a character being missed we need to file it as a bug and update the entity conversion method.
Thanks in advance, and a very big thank you to Daemon for adding this feature in V2.
You're welcome as always :)
-- geoff http://www.daemon.com.au/
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