Re: [syndication] Syndication Subscription

[Dan Lyke <danlyke@flutterby.com>]

On Mon, 3 Jul 2000, Gabe Beged-Dov wrote:
> As to the topic of this thread, what are you thinking a publicationID
> is? Is it just another URL?

I see it as an unsigned int, or other handle of some sort. There should be
room in the API for discovery of a master URL associated with it, but it's
primarily a way to say "Choose this entry from this list".

> Another question is whether you are talking about getting stories or
> getting headlines (or metadata about the stories).

A protocol that I think we need *right now* is a way to publish last
changed information about pages. I think it can be dramatically expanded,
but implementing the basics of Aaron's proposal with one addition would be
useful right now to Metafilter and Scripting News.

That one addition is: Did the change affect content or was it just an
editing fix?

Publishers of "last change" info need a way to stop clogging bandwidth to
see if pages have changed, but more importantly they need a way to tell if
the reason that the last page they grabbed differs from the current one
because someone made a new entry or the ad banner changed.

> This is a key distinction that underlies alot of the tension between
> approaches like RSS and something like ICE. Rael has also made the
> point that ScriptingNews provides good support for syndicating stories
> rather than headlines.

Even though Flutterby only has one real data stream, I can see offering
several different publication IDs, one that broadcasts the URL of the main
HTML page, one that broadcasts the URL of the simplified HTML page, one of
the RSS file, I've been threatening for a year or so to make a
ScriptingNews format file (even though I don't like a few issues about the
format), etc.

The other place that multiple publication IDs for the same data would be
handy would be to allow a subscriber to look for changes to my archive
files versus my root index file. One person could request that the "new
story" function pass through the archive URLs while another could just say
"notify me any time a new story appears in the main URL".

So I'd modify Aaron's API by changing the Subscriber functions to:

   newStory(subscriptionID, storyURL);
   changedStory(subscriptionID, storyURL);

This would let Dave's 'blog list, for instance, not return my page as
changed every time I fix the spelling or someone makes a comment and the
comment count shows up on my outer page, even though in both cases I
might publish the same storyURL (http://www.flutterby.com/).

And perhaps I'd put some sort of list of master types that we can pass
back with the "getPublications" array that lets us tell if a given
publication is RSS, ICE, HTML, or whatever. Aaron, you wanna be the keeper
of the master list?

My wrists need a break, but I'll see about slapping a preliminary
implementation of the publisher side of this together, and then maybe see
what I can do about some sort of aggregating client later.

Dan