One of the things that bugs me about RSS feeds is that they are a pull technology (instead of a push), but don't use of the classic advantages of pull technology, which is the ability to be selective. It seems like it would be incredibly easy to add a parameter or two to the request to filter the results. For example, the RSS feed for this weblog is:
BlogStories.xml
but since this is a Domino RSS feed, why not allow you to select a bit more, such as:
BlogStories.xml&OpenAgent&Comments=Yes
and comments would be included, or
BlogStories.xml&OpenAgent&Category=Lotusphere
and only subjects in the Lotusphere category would be returned. Likewise, you could use:
BlogStories.xml&OpenAgent&Cutoff=2006-01-05
and only topics after the cutoff date would be returned. But why bother, you may ask? Well, here is what led me to this. Christopher Linfoot made a request about the new RSS feeds that have been added to the Lotus LDD forums, which is that comments be separated into a separate feed, as the volume is too extreme the way it is now. But I hate comments in a separate feed. So it occurred to me, why not only give main topics by default, but add a hotspot on each main topic that says "Pull in thread", and then the default:
could be replaced by something like:
which would pull in that whole thread. The RSS readers could handle the variability now in most cases, as they don't get rid of old content just because it is not in the feed, and they don't duplicate posts, so the thread would simply be populated. This seems to me like the best of both worlds. Have I missed something, or could we propose this?
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