Manni, if you use the new Mozilla Firefox 1.0PR on the chongqed wiki you will see an RSS icon in the status bar. If you click on it you can create a special RSS bookmark folder that reads the RSS feed and updates links to the posts. It doesn't work here though. It says "live bookmark feed failed to load". It works on Slashdot and my blog (though for some reason there are two listed, maybe because its an atom feed instead of RSS feed). Not a feature I really care about, but that may mean RSS isn't working at all on the wiki. I can live without RSS working on the wiki, just thought since the icon was there it should work. I don't really see much point in a wiki having an RSS feed in the first place. – Joe
Hmm. I had a look at the OddMuse docs but there doesn't seem to be any special switch to enable the rss feeds. OTOH, it says that an rss feed is pretty costly (for the server). I don't know what Firefox is seeing that makes it want to give you an RSS icon. I don't even have the old version installed. – Manni
Firefox is looking at http://wiki.chongqed.org/?action=rss which returns a 0 byte file, probably because this is in the head of the wiki html:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://wiki.chongqed.org/?action=rss">
I agree that RSS can be pretty costly to the server. You have no way of controlling how often people update. For a big site like slashdot it makes a little sense, the bandwidth of the feed is less than all the geeks hitting reload every few mintues. That reminds me I should go reload. ;-) – Joe
OK. Well, the "link rel" stuff is gone now. – Manni
… and today, I get some good reasons from an article on The Register. Here are some quotes:
– Manni
I just figured if the icons there in FF it should work, its gone now. I have always thought RSS was a dumb idea in the first place. Its just like push technology that was going to be big in the late 90s but failed at least partly for the same reason I think. I also think the same about the Segway. – Joe
I use the sage plugin in Firefox and for keepiong an eye on 50 wikis it's great. rss causes a hell of a serverload I fear. But used wisely there is a lot to construct with it. Pitty it doesn't work here. – MattisManzel
Whatever you think about RSS feeds, for Oddmuse's RSS feed to work, you need some perl modules that aren't available on this server. There isn't much I can do about this, I'm afraid. – Manni - 2004-12-12 17:48
As RSS becomes more popular it is becoming a problem for servers. There is stuff a server can do to lessen the bandwidth, but there is no way for the site owner to make sure its used wisely, its up to the user to not set it to update too frequently. Slashdot recently had an article on RSS. --Joe - 2004-12-13 13:30 UTC