A New RSS Feed

You may now view the 10 most recently posted comments directly in your aggregator, or use the feed however you see fit. And the RSS binge continues...

The Movable Type template that makes this feed possible is my own. Though I worked from the RSS 2.0 template included in Movable Type, I actually had to make some important decisions as to how the information would be presented.

First, the author element requires an email address. I do not require that comment posters on this site provide an email address. Solution? I used the contributor element in the dc namespace instead. I don't know enough about aggregators and how they work to fully understand the ramifications of my decision, but the information I have available is in the feed. I can't parse the feed for an application; all I can do is provide the information in as semantically-correct a manner as possible. I've done this.

Second, I do not make use of the title element. My original intention was to provide a title that included a link back to the parent of the comment, but the title element supports only plain text. As at least one of the title or description attributes are required, I elected to use the description field without a link. To be sure that a link to the parent was provided, I again turned to the dc namespace and its title element, which has no restrictions on HTML.

If I've made poor assumptions about how to present this data, please let me know. I'm fairly new to the RSS scene, and am doing my best to understand it. If, on the other hand, you like what I've done and are interested in using the template on your own MT-powered site, let me know. I'd be happy to hook you up.

November 05, 2002 - 02:45 PM