[pmwiki-users] Problems with Wiki and RSS

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 07:50:34PM +0200, Philippe Krait wrote:
> I am a complete newbie in that area, so I might be missing something 
> obvious. I have tried both the PmFeed and the RSS Improved recipes, and 
> although the second one is better, I still have a problem with what I 
> want to do. It might also be because of the RSS readers that I am trying 
> (Firefox extensions both).

In spite of the fact that I wrote the feeds.php recipe, I'm
really a bit of a newbie in this area, too.  But if the problem 
you're experiencing is appearing in Firefox, we really ought to see
about fixing it.

> Anyway, the problem that I have is that my feed correctly contains the 
> updated pages. However, if I mark one as read, and I update the page 
> again, it never appears as updated. This is probably because the page is 
> marked as already visited by the browser. However, the page _contents_ 
> have been updated, and this does not show. 

I think that some of the Firefox extensions associate "read/not read"
with individual urls, so once a particular url is marked as "read",
it doesn't show up again, even if the contents of the url change
(and the date along with it).

I know that one thing many people have tried is to include a date
of some sort along with the url, so that the RSS reader gets a new
url every time the article changes.  This can be done in config.php
with:

    $FeedFmt['rss']['item']['link'] = '{$PageUrl}&when={$ItemISOTime}';

This causes a "&when=" parameter to be added to each of the
items' urls, so that whenever the page changes, it gets a new
feed url.

Personally I'm not a big fan of that solution, because it implies
that the page with different dates appended might appear differently
in the results.  I think that instead of simply marking a url as
"read", an RSS reader ought to keep track of when the url was read,
and not display the url as long as its date doesn't change.

> And the Watch lists do not 
> register the pages as being updated either.

I'm not sure about this one -- are you talking about the watch lists
using the Notify capability, or some other watch lists?

Pm