RSS was: [Pmwiki-users] Pushing towards a 2.0 release

[Bronwyn Boltwood]

Oops, forgot to CC the list.

On Sat, 30 Oct 2004 01:13:29 +0200, Knut Alboldt <pmwiki at alboldt.de> wrote:
> At 20:57 29.10.2004, you wrote:
> >Something missing, as far as I know, from pmwiki2 is support for
> >feeds. I don't really care what format (RSS/Atom) they are; if
> >necessary I can sign up for Feedburner. I want them because:
> >- they let me notify my readers of updates, without having to be
> >intrusive or collect email addresses.
> >- I use them to track changes to my wiki, such as questions or
> >vandalism, without cluttering up my inbox.
>
> could you give some more information about that topic (might be off topic
> pmwiki ?). I've heard of rss, but don't really know how this could be used
> for the jobs you described above. Is it already built into v1 ?

Yes, they are in v.1, if you enable it as described at
http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/AvailableActions.  There's some more
information at http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Development/RssGeneration.

Feeds mean that sites are politer. In the past, you had to check a
site regularly to know if there was new content, and it was annoying.
With feeds, the site serves you instead of you serving it: the site's
feed tells you about updates, without interrupting or intruding.

If your audience wants to be notified of changes, they don't need to
sign up for email notifications. They can subscribe to the site's feed
instead. They can even subscribe to a specific group or wikitrail,
because of how Pm implemented it.  No worries about their address
being harvested or sold, and it doesn't clog up their inbox.  Wiki
admins can watch for action items or vandalism.

# You or your audience must have RSS reader software. (There's plenty
of choices available, and a few are listed at
http://blogspace.com/rss/readers. I use Bloglines, because I can use
it from any computer.)
# You then subscribe to the appropriate feed, which for PmWiki will be
something like http://example.com/wiki/pmwiki.php?pagename=Main.AllRecentChanges?action=rss.
 Other sites will probably have feeds like
http://www.dansdata.com/dansdata.xml.
# If your reader understands the feed, it will then list all current
items, which you can read, open in a browser window, or delete.

You can get more information from
http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-10088_7-5143656.html?tag=hed

Bronwyn