Finally! RSS for everything!

July 18, 2007 6:55 PM

New feature: RSS on all threads. If you're using IE7, Firefox, or Safari, open any thread on mefi, ask mefi, metatalk, music, or travel and you'll see a small RSS icon in your address bar. Click that, and you'll find a feed of the post and all comments. We'll soon add explicit links on the pages themselves, but for now the autodiscovery tag should work. Use this feature to track new comments on questions you've asked, threads you were interested in hearing followups, and any other thread you'd like to stay up to date on in your RSS reader.
posted by mathowie to feature requests at 6:55 PM (54 comments total)

Just toss /rss on the end of thread URLs. See?

http://metatalk.metafilter.com/14579/Finally-RSS-for-everything/rss
posted by mathowie at 6:56 PM on July 18, 2007

Cool, thanks Matt!
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:04 PM on July 18, 2007

Excellent work!

Speaking of Travel, how's that coming along?
posted by carsonb at 7:13 PM on July 18, 2007

It's...getting there!
posted by cortex at 7:15 PM on July 18, 2007

Ba dum TISH
posted by CitrusFreak12 at 7:15 PM on July 18, 2007

This is awesome.
posted by voidcontext at 7:21 PM on July 18, 2007

Hawt.
posted by ottereroticist at 7:23 PM on July 18, 2007

Woohoo! Thanks!
posted by schnee at 7:28 PM on July 18, 2007

Very cool.
posted by Manjusri at 7:32 PM on July 18, 2007

Yee-haw! Nice work.
posted by nenequesadilla at 7:38 PM on July 18, 2007

Very nice.
posted by Tuwa at 7:51 PM on July 18, 2007

Neat! Now what I really, really, really want is an RSS of my recent activity page, so I can get a combined feed of all the new posts in threads that I've posted in, so that I can quit refreshing constantly on these slow days weeks lives.
posted by anaelith at 7:57 PM on July 18, 2007

Very neat!

Can we also get RSS feeds for the popular favorites page?

I'll provide my own saddle.
posted by achmorrison at 8:01 PM on July 18, 2007

Matt, you rock. You have earned beer.
posted by mullingitover at 8:04 PM on July 18, 2007

Can we also get RSS feeds for the popular favorites page?

We haven't yet because stuff moves onto and off of that page every hour or so. It doesn't really make sense for RSS.
posted by mathowie at 8:04 PM on July 18, 2007

Excellent - been waiting for this.

Now for a way to make the RSS feeds 'disposable' (like disappear after 90 days), but that's a task for Feed Readers, more likely.
posted by kokogiak at 8:12 PM on July 18, 2007

Finally, I can read 600 MeFi Feeds For Pleasure and Profit!
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 8:19 PM on July 18, 2007

We haven't yet because stuff moves onto and off of that page every hour or so. It doesn't really make sense for RSS.

So much for my plan for the MetaFilterFiltered feed. Oh well.
posted by achmorrison at 8:22 PM on July 18, 2007

Yes, today is a day when the mods have truly earned beer, or if they so choose, a "sleeping in".
posted by RMD at 8:34 PM on July 18, 2007

This will make it much easier for me to scrape the site to populate my GoogleAd farm!
posted by Abiezer at 8:45 PM on July 18, 2007

How utterly cool. Much obliged. :)
posted by WCityMike at 8:54 PM on July 18, 2007

Sweet.
posted by muckster at 9:04 PM on July 18, 2007

The subscribe link is a bit of a distracting focal point in its current location. Perhaps it would be better at the bottom of the thread? That would also typically be the point at which I might choose to subscribe.
posted by Manjusri at 9:14 PM on July 18, 2007

Wellll, crap. NOW what am I gonna ask for for Christmas?

Hurray!!
posted by matty at 9:18 PM on July 18, 2007

Manjusri speaks aright, to my mind, mathowie. Please link us at the end!
posted by cgc373 at 9:18 PM on July 18, 2007

Alright, I'll move the link down to the end in a day or two.
posted by mathowie at 9:22 PM on July 18, 2007

kokogiak writes "Now for a way to make the RSS feeds 'disposable' (like disappear after 90 days),"

30 days for the blue and grey, 1 year for the green.
posted by Mitheral at 9:38 PM on July 18, 2007

Oh crap, my RSS reader is about to be filled to the rim.
posted by davejay at 9:46 PM on July 18, 2007

Oh good call. Maybe I'll only generate them for a limited time, when comments are allowed on them, and then simply bounce requests after that. That might keep the load down.
posted by mathowie at 10:20 PM on July 18, 2007

great addition to the site. thanks!
posted by hootch at 10:47 PM on July 18, 2007

Excellent addition!
posted by misha at 11:12 PM on July 18, 2007

No, keep the link at the top. Just make it tiny, and then add a nice big one below the Post Comment.
posted by Deathalicious at 2:09 AM on July 19, 2007

Can we keep the RSS icon at the top? It makes sense for it to be there, in a consistent place, as opposed to at the end, which will always shift. If it's that distracting to folks, maybe just drop the icon and use a text link instead?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:12 AM on July 19, 2007

So rockin'. How rockin'? Extremely rockin'.
posted by gleuschk at 5:46 AM on July 19, 2007

The subscribe link is a bit of a distracting focal point in its current location.

What he said.
posted by smackfu at 5:47 AM on July 19, 2007

Nice, it's a godsend.
posted by tmcw at 6:10 AM on July 19, 2007

You know what's awesome-ist about this? I can use it to circumvent my work's web filter and read the comments in threads that would otherwise get blocked. Whee, RSS!
posted by misskaz at 7:39 AM on July 19, 2007

I got a pony!
posted by desjardins at 7:48 AM on July 19, 2007

Fantastic. Thank you!
posted by Bryan Behrenshausen at 7:54 AM on July 19, 2007

If you do stop generating the feeds when the threads close after N days, maybe have the closing-function add one more entry to the RSS feed, saying that the thread is closed? That'd be a good reminder to unsubscribe.
posted by gleuschk at 8:13 AM on July 19, 2007

foreach ($mods as $mod) $skorgu->buyBeer($mod);
posted by Skorgu at 9:11 AM on July 19, 2007

If you do stop generating the feeds when the threads close after N days, maybe have the closing-function add one more entry to the RSS feed, saying that the thread is closed? That'd be a good reminder to unsubscribe.
posted by gleuschk at 10:13 AM on July 19

What he said.
posted by Ynoxas at 9:19 AM on July 19, 2007

So I wanted to get a feed for my own favorites (threads, preferably), but tacking on /rss to the URL just takes me to an old (I assume -- the locations of things have gotten a bit bewildering to me these days) "Posts and comments from across all sites, marked as a favorite most often in the past seven days."

I assume this is unintended.

So, can we get our faves (ie threads we've saved as favorites) as a feed?
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:08 PM on July 19, 2007

I am going to fill my pool with metafilter now.
posted by srboisvert at 2:13 AM on July 20, 2007

I'm missing something probably basic: how do I get the new comments to show up at the top? As it is, all new stuff shows up at the bottom, which is how MeFi (and most boards like this) works, but kinda counterinstinctual for an RSS reader.
posted by bugbread at 3:30 AM on July 20, 2007

It would be great if this worked for answered questions on ask mefi...
posted by rush at 11:45 AM on July 20, 2007

How do you mean, rush?
posted by cortex at 11:54 AM on July 20, 2007

Ah. Either I looked at it wrong earlier (bad me!) or mathowie modified it (good mathowie!), because now the new stuff all shows up at the top. Very very nice ^_^
posted by bugbread at 8:07 AM on July 21, 2007

The RSS feeds are starting to show up in Google searches. I doubt this is what anyone wants. I would suggest that they be disallowed in robots.txt.

Does anyone read the posts down here? If not, I can post a new thread.
posted by grouse at 8:37 AM on July 22, 2007

Thanks!
posted by homodigitalis at 8:56 AM on July 22, 2007

cortex - I'm particularly addicted to the "Answered" tab on ask mefi - http://ask.metafilter.com/home/answered/. However, my attempts to rss it, with http://ask.metafilter.com/home/answered/rss have proven unsuccessful. I can only get an RSS feed of all of the questions, not just the ones that have answers marked as "best."

I'm not griping - the rss functionality is great. I'm just adding another small grain to the pile of requests.

Thank you for asking!
posted by rush at 2:04 PM on July 25, 2007

Oh ho! I get you now. Yeah, that'd be a neat feed to keep around.

(As I understand it, the "add /rss" thing is specifically a hack on the threads proper, so it won't do nothin' on any of the specialty urls, but that doesn't mean we couldn't build a feed.)
posted by cortex at 2:32 PM on July 25, 2007

Are there RSS feeds for user comments?
posted by chunking express at 9:22 AM on July 26, 2007

I would love to have an RSS feed for the "Recent Flickr Photos" page, recentphotos.mefi. I know it's not updated frequently, but that's ok, I'd only look once a day anyways.
posted by sidereal at 6:15 AM on July 27, 2007