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All the information I could find regarding generating RSS feeds gives examples where an indeterminate number of items is returned.
That doesn't seem too practical, especially if I have a ton of entries and a ton of clients idly polling the feed.
Is there a magic number for how many items I should return? Should I just return everything I have?
I guess that depends on the type of information you syndicate, how often new items are added and the way your audience will use it.
If it's a news feed with dozens of new entries per day, 50 or 60 might be a good number, if it's only updated a few times per month or even less often, 20 will be more than enough.
If it's some kind of specialized information intended to be processed by other software, an entirely different number might be more appropriate.
There is no the magic answer here.
Just return some amount you think is enough.
In my user experience I've seen even feeds, that return 1 (one) item. As well as the ones, that returns ~100.
I think that the number of 20 is good compromise.
Also - you can rely on the period, not a specific number. In this case you could give the feeds added since last 24 hours, for example.
#Zerkms is correct IMO -> there is no magic number or industry standard, etc.
I feel like most people give a max of 20 items. If you want to be real tricky, give the consumer the option to specify the max number of items in the feed URL.
eg. http://www.yourWebSite.com/someFeed.rss?maxCount=whatever
It comes down to the content you are dishing up. Is it fresh/stale/a lot in a short period, etc.. ?
How many items should you give? Let's first answer another question: How many items can you give?
TLDR Answer
If you use RSS v. 0.91: use 15 items.
If you use RSS v. 1.00, v. 2.00, or later: use 100 items.
Your RSS Version Can Limit Your Items
If you are using RSS Version 0.91...
...a maximum of 15 items per channel is enforced at this time. (Source: RSS 0.91 Specification; emphasis mine.)
If you are using RSS Version 1.0, or 2.0, there is no limit that can be found in the specification. (Source: RSS 2.0 Specification.)
Should You Worry About Version 0.91's Limits?
Probably not, but maybe.
According to Wikipedia.com, based on data from 2007 (14 years ago)...
...the three main versions of RSS in current use are 0.91, 1.0, and 2.0, constituting 13%, 17%, and 67% of worldwide RSS usage, respectively.
Oddly enough, w3schools gives different numbers in 2015, which, based on their round numbers, are probably just guesses...
About 50 % of all RSS feeds use RSS 0.91
About 25 % use RSS 1.0
The last 25 % is split between RSS 0.9x versions and RSS 2.0 (Source: W3Schools.com.)
Handle All Cases
You can use the <description /> element in RSS to describe the feed, and here you can give useful information, like...
If you want this RSS feed in version 0.91, use this URL: example.com/news.rss?version=0.91
Then I just set the item count to 15 in this version. Otherwise I use about 100.
This will only work if your RSS file is generated by a PHP file, which requires a little bit of back-end magic with .htaccess. But it provides a perfectly working RSS version for everyone.
Related
I am using Google Forms. 5 questions within the Google Form use the dropdown question type, and there are more than 160 answer options within each of the five dropdowns. This is really not user-friendly. I'd like to be able to organize the dropdowns with tabs by alphabet (A-D, E-H, etc.) so it's less visually overwhelming to the user.
I'm just getting started on this problem. There are no Forms add-ons that would solve this issue. I know I need to write code for the 5 items, but this is not my strongest area.
Google Forms doesn't include a way to do this. I think that your best bet is to build a form by your own i.e. by using Google Apps Script's HTML Service.
If you do a search it's very likely that you will found some hacks like copying the source code of the respondent view of a Google Form. That was easier on old Google Forms that were based on pretty basic HTML and JavaScript. Nowadays it's a lot harder to do something like that because the source code (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) is being generated by other code.
Related Q&A
Is there a way to edit css of new google forms?
Reference
https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/html
I think I'm a bit late, but the way I found to get over this was by creating first group of answers that led to 5 other second groups of answers. Make one section containing the first 5 possible questions, than make other 5 sections to re-direct depending on wich section the person answering chooses.
Example:
Section 1 (make it a one answer only single column multiple choice type)
What time is it?
a) 7am (make it lead to Section 2 if marked)
b) 8am (make it lead to Section 3 if marked)
c) 9am (make it lead to Section 4 if marked)
d) 10am (make it lead to Section 5 if marked)
e) 11am (make it lead to Section 6 if marked)
Section 2 (make it a dropdown type)
2.a) And how many minutes?
a) 7:01
b) 7:02
c) 7:03
etc etc
Section 3 (make it a dropdown type)
2.b) And how many minutes?
a) 8:01
b) 8:02
c) 8:03
etc etc
And keep up until you are done with all the sections. It's overwhelming for you, but as you said, you only cared about how it would be for the ones answering it, and I guess you are right about it.
I can't figure out how to "discard but keep" a story... I was thinking reject was the answer, but I'm not so sure since when I reject it, the story still sits in my current column with a restart button visible.
Sometimes I go down the wrong track, create a Story (feature) that I realize later I don't need or want. However, I don't want to trash it - I'd like to keep it for future reference, but I want it to go away somewhere - not sit in my current column forever.
Does anyone know how to do this?
Pivotal Support explains just exactly why nobody posted an answer...
Short Answer:
not possible
Long Answer (from Pivotal Support):
Unfortunately there's not a way to archive stories in Tracker and as you've discovered, the reject button doesn't remove stories from
Current.
In these cases we recommend creating a label describing the situation
(“on-hold”, “not reproducible”, won't fix", etc.) to apply to such
stories, and then move the story to the bottom of the Icebox along
with a concise comment explaining the decision (you must "unstart" the
story before it can be moved to the Icebox). You can also use a
release marker in the icebox to separate stories like this from
others, as in the attached screenshot.
Here is a post by Pivotal themselves that explains what they do with such stories.
https://twitter.com/pivotaltracker/status/337950414244810753
Basically, they mark as duplicate, won't fix, won't implement, etc. After, they set the story points to 0. Then they accept the story so it is still able to be searched on their project. The story points as 0 is important so that accepting the story doesn't increase your velocity for work that essentially wasn't done.
The post is a little old (3 years at time of writing, with 1 year old update), but I haven't found a better way thus far.
I am thinking of using either RSS or Atom in my project, but also "enhancing" the feed with some of my own special attributes specifically used by my project.
So I have two questions:
1) Which is most used of RSS and Atom on the web and by the big sites?
2) Which is most suitable to be build from by adding my own tags?
Update:
So RSS is most used, but I should pick Atom since I need to make my own tweaks on a feed? If RSS is more popular, why not pick that? Why didn't Google pick that?
There was a day when I was really interested in syndication and publishing formats. I knew all the quirks of RSS 0.91/1.0/2.0 and Atom 1.0 (and the 0.3 version). Atom was basically born to create something more complete out of the RSS experience which consisted roughly only on the very specifications of Dave Winer's and Netscape's (now only the RSS 2.0 makes practical sense and its specification is here: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html). Atom was started by Sam Ruby, then was adopted and developed by a committee of savvy people and it resulted in two things: an XML based syndication format and a publishing protocol. Since 2005 Atom is an IETF standard and in my opinion more complete and better specified than RSS.
As of adoption I think that in raw numbers RSS is still in advantage. A lot of sites decided to stick with the version they already had in place (RSS) and podcasting is usually done on RSS too. There a ton of websites offering both by the way.
As of expanding the format, your second question, Atom has been created with this in mind so you should go down that route. Google GData format is basically an extension of the Atom format: https://developers.google.com/gdata/docs/1.0/elements
Atom is absolutely the standard to go for.
I presume you're using the standard to share (or move) information - so it's like a pipe that your information is padding along. By adopting Atom you can be confident that both ends of the pipe are in agreement about what's in there. It's more hit & miss with RSS.
I want to create a dropdown of RSS feeds and users can pick and choose the feeds they want and a custom feed would be created. Is this possible using straight up HTML and java script or do I need a server technology. There are 7 separate feeds so the possible combinations are 7! - far too many for me to individually code into if statements and separate feeds. Is there a program that will generate the possible feeds for me automatically after I update one of them? Then I could just upload the updated xml files.
Right. So I set up my xml files, say I have one for birthdays, one for deaths, and one for mid life crises. So that is three xml files with three separate links for rss feeds. Now what I want is for people to be able to check off the ones to which they wish to subscribe rather than hitting each one separately. So I would have a form with three checkboxes and a submit button. I could do this with javascript by having 6 separate xml feeds, one for each possible combination. But if I have 4 feeds then I need to set up 24 feeds, and 5 would be 120 possible feed combinations.
So the question becomes, is there some software or library that will either handle this computation for me and crank out RSS mixes/blends similar to what some RSS mixing software seems to do. The problem with the services and software I have seen is that it provides blending for people subscribing to feeds but not for providers. I can see in my head how easily this could be done programmatically even though it would spit out alot of xml and html/javascript.
I guess another way about it would be for them to sign up for multiple feeds simultaneously but I'm not sure if that can be done.
If I am making no sense I apologize. I have never seen this done so it might not be possible. I am just going to go with the page with a bunch of RSS links.
Thanks for everyones responses. I appreciate it.
Just because there are 7 options doesn't mean you need to write 7! if statements. You only need to check if each one of the options is set, and output something appropriately.
So, yes, you need to do this server side. And it's not at all difficult.
Where are you stuck, specifically? Your question is missing a few details.
I want to merge multiple rss feeds into a single feed, removing any duplicates. Specifically, I'm interested in merging the feeds for the tags I'm interested in.
[A quick search turned up some promising links, which I don't have time to visit at the moment]
Broadly speaking, the ideal would be a reader that would list all the available tags on the site and toggle them on and off, allowing me to explore what's available, keep track of questions I've visited, new answers on interesting feeds, etc, etc . . . though I don't suppose such a things exists right now.
As I randomly explore the site and see questions I think are interesting, I inevitably find "oh yes, that one looked interesting a couple days ago when I read it the first time, and hasn't been updated since". It would be much nicer if my machine would keep track of such deails for me :)
Update: You can now use "and", "or", and "not" to combine multiple tags into a single feed: Tags AND Tags OR Tags
Update: You can now use Filters to watch tags across one or multiple sites: Improved Tag Stes
Have you heard of Yahoo's Pipes.
Its an interactive feed aggregator and
manipulator. List of 'hot pipes' to
subscribe to, and ability to create
your own (yahoo account required).
I played with it during beta back in the day, however I had a blast. Its really fun and easy to aggregate different feeds and you can add logic or filters to the "pipes". You can even do more then just RSS like import images from flickr.
I create a the stackoverflow tag feeds pipe. You can list your tags of choice into the text box and it will combine them into a single feed with all the unique posts. It escapes '#' and '+' characters for you.
Alternatively, you can use the pipe's rss feed by appending your html-encoded tags separated by '+'s:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=uP22vN923RG_c71O1ZzWFw&_render=rss&tags=.net+c%23+powershell
Unfortunatley, though, this seems to strip out the content of the posts. The content is visible in the debug view, but the output only contains the post title.
[Thanks to everyone for suggesting Yahoo Pipes! Had heard of it before, but never tried it until now :-]
SimplePie is a PHP library that supports merging RSS feeds into one combined feed. I don't believe it does dupe checking out-of-the-box, but I found it trivial to write a little function to eliminate duplicate content via their GUIDs.
Here is an article on Merge Multiple RSS Feeds Into One with Yahoo! Pipes + FeedBurner.
Another option is Feed Rinse, but they have a paid version as well as the free version.
Additionally:
I have heard good things about AideRss
Yahoo Pipes?
23 minutes later:
Aww, I got answer-sniped by #Bernie Perez. Oh well :)
In the latest Podcast, Jeff and Joel talked about the RSS feeds for tags, and Joel noted that there is only the current ability to do AND on tags, not OR.
Jeff suggested that this would be included at some stage in the future.
I think that you should request this on uservoice, or vote for it if it is already there.