Future of Feeds

October 15th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

RSS

One of the hardest parts of building fav.or.it has been compatibility issues with all the different feed formats. RSS in particular has been used and abused on a grand scale and it really opened my eyes when we started building our aggregator. We use Zend Framework so although we looked around at a lot of other libraries for feed aggregation we found that nothing covered every issue, so we ended up (as usual) building our own more robust aggregator framework. This was built upon Zend_Feed which gave us a head start and let us concentrate on pulling out the data.

Future Feed Formats

The second difficulty is that our aggregator has to cope with posts and comments, as far as I know we (currently) are the only company doing this and yes we have come across lots of issues with how we merge the posts and comments back together again and we do not have 100% coverage (yet). Although we hope to work with many of the major blogging platform suppliers to improve this we also want to start the ball rolling on a new feed format.

We want to take RSS / ATOM and extend them to include a better hierarchy that can be used to store posts & comments within one feed. If anyone is interested in taking part in a new working group that will discuss the problem please drop me a line via the contact form. I will be setting up a discussion group/blog within fav.or.it once it goes live.

Video Coverage

I also just put up a post on the fav.or.it blog covering the current hot topic of Google Readership stats which also includes the video of me by intruders.tv while we were at the FOWA show.

There Are 2 Responses So Far. »

  1. Comment by Markus Wolff on 15 October 2007:

    Hey Nick,

    I wonder what you did to work around the issues described here:

    http://framework.zend.com/issues/browse/ZF-1863

    …did you basically fork Zend_Feed to work around this, or just extend it and rewrote some methods? I ask because I found that it is impossible to retrieve the content of some feeds without altering the Zend code itself.

    CU
    Markus

  2. Comment by Nick Halstead on 15 October 2007:

    Most of it can be worked around (but its not ideal)

    So for instance the problem,

    $feed = new Zend_Feed_Atom(’http://www.planet-php.net/atom’);
    foreach($feed as $item) {
    echo $item->link().”\n”;
    }

    Link can contain a hierarchy, and can contain a range of different link sources, here is an example of the syntax to take it out.

    if($item->link()) {
    $self = $item->link(’self’);
    }

    This help?

Post a Response