[matilda] Web site / Web Forums

[Alan Dawson]

Quoting atw <againstthewar at totalserve.co.uk>:

> Alan> As they generate RSS and or ATOM feeds.
>
> Maybe you could explain what these are and why our BBS would need
> them.

RSS and ATOM are 2 different ways of getting recently changed information
easily
from a web site.  

For instance the BBC, The Guardian, and Indymedia all generate RSS feeds from
their different sections.  You can aggregate these feeds in one place with some
software called a news aggregator, which will poll these feeds periodically.

The upshot is, instead of having to go an check each site individually to get
the latest changes, your news aggregator can pull them and "aggregate" them for
you.

Some example of this are here.

Local Indymedia News
http://www.burngreave.net/aggregator/categories/10

Burngreave Related News
http://www.burngreave.net/burngreave

A Selection of UK News Headlines
http://www.burngreave.net/aggregator/categories/9


Now the aggregation does not have to be done on a website, but can be done
using
some stand alone software.  If you use a Linux Distribution there is
akregator http://akregator.sourceforge.net/
or
blam http://developer.imendio.com/wiki/Blam

More are listed here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_news_aggregators


A rss reader is to be built into the next M$ windows release
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/clear.mspx


The Matilda Wiki generates RSS and Atom feeds for its recent changes
https://wiki.sheffieldsocialforum.org.uk/Special:Recentchanges

As does the software MKDoc we started installing for the main matilda web site.

So you see we are already surrounded by a vast amount of rss information
already.  I would suggest that an rss / atom feed would be a necessary feature
of any BBS that install.

On a different note.  When we started with burngreave.net 5 years ago, we had a
vision of a web site for every managed community resource.  The people managing
the resources could tell the stories of the resources (ie blog whats going on
).  And people would subscribe to the news feeds that interested / were
important to them.  For example I might be interested in childcare places at
the creche, or allotment digging days or happy hour promotions at the pub.  So
i would subscribe to creche.burngreave, or allotment.burngreave or
pub.burngreave etc.

Unfortunately we've had difficulty articulating that vision to resource holders
:-(  Maybe now those visions can become easier to see for others.

Hope that helps
AED
-- 
"If you make decisions about software -- or anything -- based solely on
short-term cost and benefit, someone with a longer view can easily
manoeuver you into a trap from which it is hard to escape."