Atom vs RSS 2.0 in a Microblog Context

[axodys]

One thing that's been weighing on me for a while since discovering this project is that you chose to implement the xml feed with Atom rather than RSS 2.0. This surprised me because Atom specifies that every post must have a title and a defining feature of RSS and the microblog effort is that titles are optional. One of the things I'm thinking about working on next is getting the xml feed closer to parity with the json feed with image attachments support, but my inclination is to do the work in a new rebuild_rss_feed() function and leave the Atom support alone. Does that sound reasonable to you? An RSS implementation could also allow for micro podcast support in the future as well if we just passed entries with audio attachments.

[oelna]

To be honest, I have thought a lot about this. I still prefer Atom from an idealistic point of view and consider it a nicer format to read. It is true though, that the world has mostly expanded upon RSS and Atom is more of a niche spec.

It makes total sense to at least include RSS in the mix of feed formats. In fact I have begun work on a feed in h-feed format, since I needed it for .bar export. It may be time to refactor all feed-related code into a sort of feed library, since these functions can become quite wordy. Also, the way in which posts and attachments are loaded in general could probably be improved. Maybe I'll look into setting up a function that retrieves posts and attached files all at once, which could be useful especially for the feed generation.

If you like, you're welcome to draft rebuild_rss_feed()! I'm not totally sure about what the feed file would be called, though. I guess feed.rss is still free? Is that a thing? (I'd like to keep the current filenames the same, if at all possible, in order to not break peoples subscriptions.)

[axodys]

Not surprised to hear you've already been thinking about some of the things that had occurred to me in terms of refactoring the feed functions into their own library. I'm in also in full agreement that Atom is a nicer format, it's unfortunate there have been no tweaks to the spec since 2005. I think feed.rss should work fine so I'll see what I can come up with.