OK, I won't be so quick to bury them. Even when there's no fog on the glass. And the ones that smell putrid, like the financial news headlines that haven't been updated since 2004, I'll leave for someone else to decide. NG
Stuart Whitmore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Hi all, As for looking through older threads, you should be able to search the messages in the Yahoo! interface to this Yahoo! Groups mailing list. As for stale versus dead, a quarterly newsletter, a semi-annual report, and a Christmas letter are all technically-valid uses for RSS, all uses where a significant amount of time can pass between entries. If there will be future entries, the feed is not dead. There is no cost associated with having a feed in Syndicated status. Why even use time at all as a measure of how to mark a feed, unless time elapsed *plus* another factor implies that the author has abandoned it? There are feeds that are updated multiple times a week, maybe multiple times a day, and I think their content is 99% garbage. By contrast, I put a lot of thought into Lives O' My Chars (feed #312203), to use one of my blog feeds as an example. Even if you don't like my writing, you can at least understand the difference between careful creative writing and content that is partly or entirely automated and/or content that is "mind vomit" -- little more than IM-style communication dumped into a blog. I haven't written in that blog since October, i.e., not for six months. You can mark it Dead if you want, but I know I'm going to write more in it, maybe even this weekend. For someone who wants to read my writings (if there are any), marking it Dead won't be any service to them when they miss out on future entries. I would advise all reviewers to avoid a narrow view of what an RSS feed "should" be. RSS does not imply "blog" just as "blog" does not imply RSS feed. An RSS feed could, for example, be used for automated updates in a distributed software development project, by send notifications of new code (and an MD5 signature or something), which would initiate automated processes of retrieving the full code from the linked resource. Such a feed might be completely inactive for years at a time, without truly being "dead." Marking it "dead" because it doesn't fit your idea of what an RSS feed "should" be is an editorial decision, not a technical decision, and one that won't match the intent of publishers and subscribers. I don't want to sound too soapbox-ish, but I manage feeds that are updated less than once per month, and they will have more entries and thus are not "dead." In contrast, I have marked one of my own feeds as dead less than a week after its last entry, because I knew it was dead. Normally reviewers won't have intimate knowledge of whether a feed really is dead or not, so that example is an exception, but with our expected ignorance of the intent of the publisher, I think it is wiser to err on the side of leaving stale feeds in Syndicated status. I don't see there being any harm to Syndic8 or to potential feed subscribers in leaving them in that status. In most cases, I don't think a feed should be marked Dead unless it's returning 404 errors, or the host has no visible history of resolving, or some other *technical* indication of "dead-ness." -- Stuart Whitmore [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.just-stuart.com/ --------------------------------- Does your mail provider give you FREE antivirus protection? Get Yahoo! Mail [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] If you're getting "too much mail" then send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (this will tell it to stop sending you mail) To change your membership use THIS WEB PAGE: http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/syndic8/join (here you can set your mail to digest, no mail or LEAVE the list) To find more info about Syndicated XML newsfeeds visit http://www.syndic8.com/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/syndic8/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
