Page 1 of 1

CASA News RSS feed?

Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2010 3:56 pm
by Eriorg
(I hope I'm posting this in the good forum section: I don't know what's the difference between "Site feedback & announcements" and "CASA 2.0", now that the site is CASA 2.0...)

Is there an RSS feed for the "News" from the main page of the CASA site? I can't see it, at least...

Also, if there is (or when there will be) a RSS feed, it might be a good idea to add it to Planet IF, because relatively many people from the IF community will then see it.

Re: CASA News RSS feed?

Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2010 8:49 pm
by Gunness
Eriorg wrote:(I hope I'm posting this in the good forum section: I don't know what's the difference between "Site feedback & announcements" and "CASA 2.0", now that the site is CASA 2.0...)
The major difference is that the 2.0 section is for admins only, so it's mostly for development stuff, coding and such. But it might be useful to rename it to a more appropriate name.

There is no RSS feed at the moment, but I've received several suggestions indicating that it might be a viable project.
So... do people normally use a tool to create the feed or is it better to do it by hand? If the former, any suggestion as to which of the many tools to choose?

Re: CASA News RSS feed?

Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2010 9:25 pm
by Mr Creosote
Tool? We've got a scripted site here - we just need to add a hook to the news posting which generates such a 'feed' (which is really just a simple XML based markup). Alternatively, we can have a dedicated script which outputs RSS compliant markup.

Re: CASA News RSS feed?

Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2010 11:03 pm
by dave
Great minds think alike, I was musing this just last night.

We could do with at least two feeds: one for the forum (there's standard modules for this) and one for the main site. The other choice is Atom vs RSS (most browsers support both).

Re: CASA News RSS feed?

Posted: Fri Sep 24, 2010 10:29 am
by Mr Creosote
Jacob, just decide what you want on three counts:
- Feed format (RSS 1, RSS 2, Atom)
- Pre-generated static file versus dynamically generated on every call
- What to include: just the 'post' or also the games lists

Re: CASA News RSS feed?

Posted: Fri Sep 24, 2010 12:50 pm
by Gunness
Mr Creosote wrote:Jacob, just decide what you want on three counts:
As indicated above, my knowledge in this area is somewhat limited, so feel free to correct me where I'm wrong.

>Feed format (RSS 1, RSS 2, Atom)
My initial choice would be Atom, but I'm sure some of you have a firmer basis to form a list of pros and cons on.

>Pre-generated static file versus dynamically generated on every call
Given the site's structure and update frequency, I'd say that a pre-generated file would suffice.

>What to include: just the 'post' or also the games lists
Much of the time, the post will be fairly brief or of a chatty nature, so my guess is that the games list will be the more interesting one?

Re: CASA News RSS feed?

Posted: Sat Sep 25, 2010 8:09 pm
by Samwise
Jacob,

Further to the conversation we had in PM about RSS feeds a while ago, the latest version of phpBB comes with Atom feeds available as standard. They just need enabling in the ACP under the Feeds menu, if you want to supply a feed for the forums.

HTH,

Sam.

Re: CASA News RSS feed?

Posted: Sun Sep 26, 2010 3:12 pm
by Gunness
THanks for the heads-up - I hadn't noticed. There are a heap of settings so I've pretty much used the standard settings for now.

Incidentally we've also selected Atom for our news section feed. It's almost ready; the last details are being worked on.

Re: CASA News RSS feed?

Posted: Mon Sep 27, 2010 3:27 pm
by Eriorg
I've seen that the RSS feed is now here, and it seems to work! Congratulations! :thumb:

Now you'll just have to e-mail the Planet-IF maintainer and wait.

Re: CASA News RSS feed?

Posted: Tue Oct 05, 2010 12:04 pm
by Gunness
And it's listed there now :) Would probably like a few pics to freshen up the news section. If anybody has ideas, let me know.

Re: CASA News RSS feed?

Posted: Tue Oct 05, 2010 12:48 pm
by Eriorg
Gunness wrote:And it's listed there now :)
Great! :D

Re: CASA News RSS feed?

Posted: Mon Nov 15, 2010 9:43 pm
by Gunness
Is this still updating properly? My latest news entry in the feed is from Oct. 17th.

Re: CASA News RSS feed?

Posted: Mon Nov 15, 2010 10:52 pm
by Mr Creosote
The problem here is that unlike WWW browsers, feed readers are actually serious about expecting well-formed XML. One parsing function in our code (nl2p) isn't sensitive enough of its context. If there are too many line breaks in a list, it'll break the XML structure. Since I haven't written that function, I've simply added some code which removes the erronous tags again afterwards (at least the ones which appeared so far - not guaranteed to be a complete list). This should be enough as a quick fix. Should something like this happen again, this is where to look.