RSS feed available for the Saloon

One of the most commonly requested features for the Ranch are RSS feeds. While we have been getting away with dragging our feet on this for a while, now the time has come to boldly move into the 21st century!

For starters, we have turned on a feed for the "Java in General (intermediate)" forum. You'll get to it on the Saloon home page by clicking on the little "XML" image next to the forum title. Copy the URL, paste it into your favorite RSS reader, and you're good to go.

If the trial with this forum goes well, we'll enable the other forums likewise. Feedback is welcome.

The RSS feeds were not supposed to slow down the ranch ?

Supposed to? No, the RSS specification says nothing about that.

Why - have you noted any performance degradation?

Satou may be referring to the reasons we've given before about why we didn't have an RSS feed. The last time we tried, it basically killed the ranch.

This time the feed has been implemented with a different technology, so we shouldn't have the same problems.

We may have OTHER problems, though.

Satou may be referring to the reasons we've given before about why we didn't have an RSS feed

Yes, sorry for not mentioning it in my first post. That was indeed one of the main reason feeds were not used at the ranch so I was wondering why it is finally being used.

Originally posted by Satou kurinosuke:

Yes, sorry for not mentioning it in my first post. That was indeed one of the main reason feeds were not used at the ranch so I was wondering why it is finally being used.

Probably the system has be upgraded now.

Originally posted by Rahul Bhattacharjee:

Probably the system has be upgraded now.

Nope - as mentioned by Fred, the way RSS feeds are handled by the ranch has been completely re-engineered. Ulf did a fantastic job of piggybacking the RSS feed in such a way that it should not cause us slowdowns.

Regards, Andrew

Well, thank you for the effort. I hope it is going to be extended to other forums too.

It probably will be, soon. We're just checking the performance, etc before a wider release. We know that the new system has much better performance than the old one did, but that's not quite the same is being certain there will be no performance problems. Also we're interested in any other feedback people have regarding the one feed that is currently available.

Originally posted by Andrew Monkhouse:

Nope - as mentioned by Fred, the way RSS feeds are handled by the ranch has been completely re-engineered. Ulf did a fantastic job of piggybacking the RSS feed in such a way that it should not cause us slowdowns.

Regards, Andrew

Oh! Thats great.I read long back in one of the post that it might be a CUP intensive process , so ranch is not going that way.

The performance has been looking good*, so we've expanded the RSS feeds to include a semi-random sampling of some of our more popular forums. Naturally, you can tell which ones by simply looking for the

next to the forum name on our main forum page. Please don't bother telling us how you'd really like it if we added Forum X too; in all likelihood we will be adding all the forums soon, as long as we don't find any substantial problems. Meanwhile, enjoy what's there, and let us know if you spot any problems.

* Some of you may have seen some problems we had yesterday around 1530 GMT; this was unrelated to the RSS feeds, and has been fixed. We hope.

Great

Oh, and I replaced

with

since that seems to be more standard (and makes more sense to end-users who have no reason to care that RSS uses XML under the covers).

Hi,

I am pretty new to RSS so please ignore my innocence.

One Doubt:

If I get the RSS feed URL (http://faq.javaranch.com/RSS/Forum32.rss) and add this subscription in my google reader. I can read only the first post of the thread not all posts.

One Bug:

1. On the main page, the RSS symbol is updated but when we go inside a forum (servlet), the top symbol for RSS is still the old one (XML). And this symbol doesn't seem to work as it tries to open URL with four slashes. Please correct this.

Thanks.

[ May 10, 2007: Message edited by: ankur rathi ]

I can read only the first post of the thread not all posts.

That's how it is supposed to be. The feed is not a replacement of the forum, just a way of announcing what's new. Since we take care that each thread stays on topic, the first post gives a good idea of what the thread is about. That way the reader can decide whether it's worth opening the actual thread.

On the main page, the RSS symbol is updated but when we go inside a forum (servlet), the top symbol for RSS is still the old one (XML). And this symbol doesn't seem to work as it tries to open URL with four slashes.

Looks like someone changed this already.
[ May 10, 2007: Message edited by: Ulf Dittmer ]

I had already changed the symbol for both the forum summary and for individual forums. But some forums were (are?) still running off their old cached pages, until the next time someone posts in that forum. So you may possibly still find a few of the old symbols lying around, but they'll be replaced as soon as someone posts in that forum. Same thing with the broken four slashes - that was a typo which I fixed immediately after; didn't realize it managed to make it onto one of the cached pages, but it should be gone now.
[ May 10, 2007: Message edited by: Jim Yingst ]

Originally posted by Jim Yingst:
Oh, and I replaced with since that seems to be more standard (and makes more sense to end-users who have no reason to care that RSS uses XML under the covers).

Great! The

icon used to look a bit ugly beside the forum names