Enhanced RSS Feeds

[rushnp774]

I'm not sure if this is a request for a new plugin, or just an extension of the RSS capabilities native in Hotaru. If this should be posted somewhere else, I apologize.

I've been to lots of sites that have tons of RSS feeds, and they need them because they publish LOTS of content. I'd like for Hotaru to have a set of powerful, easy-to-use, cutting-edge features for publishing & managing RSS feeds. Here are some of my ideas:

- Generate RSS feeds for tags & categories - This would help encourage people to subscribe to your site but only for topics they're interested in. It'd probably be a bigger help for more general Hotaru sites, but even specialized sites could benefit. I know I'd subscribe to more sites like Mashable if they had this feature, but as it stands now, I just don't want to deal with 100+ items in my RSS reader each day from a given site.

- Custom "mashup" RSS Feed - This is just an extension of my first idea really. Some people may want to just pick a few terms to create a custom feed based on what they're interested in, instead of 10 different feeds for the tags they want to follow.

- Feed Stats, or preferable automatic FeedBurner integration - I'm a stats junkie, and would find it very helpful to know what specific topics/parts of my site(s) that people are subscribing to. Perhaps a basic back end stats display for your feeds, or better yet, automatic FeedBurner integration of all feeds created. FeedBurner is godly, and has an open API for developers. Here is the API's homepage: http://code.google.com/apis/feedburner/.

I'm sure I could come up with a dozen more ideas for how to make RSS feeds an integral, and fun part of a Hotaru site, but I'll stop here for now.

Anyone else have any interest or ideas about these features? Would any of this be possible?

[Nick]

Well, the first one is already done. Click any category, tag or user and you'll see an RSS icon for it in the breadcrumbs.

[rushnp774]

Beautiful! Guess I just never noticed it because the icon was so small. Since the groundwork is already laid (you're always one step ahead of me), do you have any thoughts about the other features I mentioned?

[JonH]

Custom "mashup" RSS Feed

I did this with SWCMS but it's been so long not sure what I did . If I can find it I will post it here and see if it can be converted.

[Nick]

Hotaru's RSS functions aren't very flexible, so you'd need a dedicated plugin to override them, but a workaround is to use Search. Like tags and categories, search results also generate an RSS feed with an icon by the breadcrumbs. E.g. search for Facebook Google on the demo site and you get a feed with posts containing those terms. What you can't do at the moment is filter them to "top" or "new" posts, users or categories.

[rushnp774]

Wow, so it seems like a plugin could (in a slightly less than elegant way) create mashups by just having people select terms, and then returning the RSS feed generated by searching those terms. Interesting.

Anyone else besides me a FeedBurner fan and have input on the FB integration?

[JonH]

Like tags and categories, search results also generate an RSS feed with an icon by the breadcrumbs.

That's what I did with SWCMS then rebadged the search form with "create your own RSS" . Small tweak since the only difference in the url is "page=rss&"

[Nick]

I've just started using FeedBurner instead of TwitterFeed to send posts to Twitter. Feels good!

[rushnp774]

I've just started using FeedBurner instead of TwitterFeed to send posts to Twitter. Feels good!

What do you like better about using FeedBurner for sending posts to Twitter instead of TwitterFeed? I suppose I wouldn't mind using FB to send tweets to Twitter, but I was really wanting to use TwitterFeed for their now-supported ping.fm integration primarily to send some posts to the Facebook and possibly other social networks.

I suppose it'd still be possible to use TwitterFeed to just send posts to Facebook (and not Twitter) as well, but it seems a bit odd to use two services to send RSS feeds to other places when TwitterFeed (+ ping.fm) can do it all in one. If I'm missing something, please enlighten me because I'm always up for learning.

[Nick]

it seems a bit odd to use two services to send RSS feeds to other places when TwitterFeed (+ ping.fm) can do it all in one.

I had about 12 feeds running through Twitterfeed and have moved the most important ones to FeedBurner because: a) Google is more reliable, and b) I can log into Google more easily. I won't bash TwitterFeed here, and still use them for a few things including ping.fm. One of my sites gets 30% of its traffic from Twitter, so using Google I can be more confident that updates are getting sent on time.