Categories on AskMe

February 5, 2007 4:34 PM

Ask MeFi finally has category feeds.
posted by mathowie (staff) to Feature Requests at 4:34 PM (47 comments total)

It was a good point from the previous thread about ask mefi, and it was only about 15 min of work to copy over my tag feed code. I should have done this from the get go, but it's finally here.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 4:35 PM on February 5, 2007

Cool, thanks!
posted by trip and a half at 4:44 PM on February 5, 2007

Beauty.
posted by bru at 4:48 PM on February 5, 2007

Rock and roll!
posted by cortex at 4:51 PM on February 5, 2007

Great.
posted by matthewr at 4:52 PM on February 5, 2007

Good on yeh, lad.
posted by boo_radley at 5:08 PM on February 5, 2007

Allll right! Thanks!
posted by jason's_planet at 5:21 PM on February 5, 2007

I was hoping this would come out of that thread. But my 10-foot pole wasn't long enough for me to touch it with. Now I might start to venture back into the wilds of Ask.Me with some regularity.
posted by Kattullus at 5:25 PM on February 5, 2007

woocha!
posted by nj_subgenius at 5:29 PM on February 5, 2007

Cheers.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 6:15 PM on February 5, 2007

Nice, nice.
posted by delmoi at 6:16 PM on February 5, 2007

Wow! Thanks!
posted by achmorrison at 6:26 PM on February 5, 2007

Thank you.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:34 PM on February 5, 2007

I can't get the "technology" category feed to load.
posted by achmorrison at 6:36 PM on February 5, 2007

Thanks, Matt.
posted by Kwine at 6:41 PM on February 5, 2007

Thanks!
posted by onlyconnect at 7:22 PM on February 5, 2007

Very cool.
posted by safetyfork at 7:22 PM on February 5, 2007

Pretty neat!
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 7:29 PM on February 5, 2007

BUT THERES STILL A TWO WEEK LIMIT!!!!

Kidding, I just wanted to mess with you all!
posted by wheelieman at 7:46 PM on February 5, 2007

technology should work now.

Remember, it's not a MetaFilter Feature™ unless part of it is broken on day one.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 7:54 PM on February 5, 2007

And the need of the feature is debated in at least three threads, each ending in shouting matches.
posted by wheelieman at 7:59 PM on February 5, 2007

yay!
posted by juv3nal at 8:01 PM on February 5, 2007

Yeah, just as a note on my permanent record so I'm not always Jerko the Complainer: Thanks, Matt. When I fired it up, I was all like "But I like to see a broad range of questions! This confuses me and takes many clicks!" but then I saw about five cool questions that I had missed. I know, I know, it's not for readers. But if I'd known the answer, I woulda helped!


More ponies for glue (and I hope that my grubbing isn't overloading you)— I started thinking how it would be neat to see, like, the top five latest from each category (since I was still missing the potpourri), but then I thought that something that would help make the pages more managable would be taking a page from email and allowing me to delete questions from my view, ideally in batches. Some sort of check box that allows me to say (all on my side) "Y'know, I'm just not gonna be interested in that question or able to answer it. Let's have less clutter." I mean, obviously, I'm not proposing to delete anything from anyone else's view, and I have to say that while I believe it could be done in that shiny ajax, I'm not enough of a programmer to do it. There'd probably be a greasemonkey thing too, if someone wanted to whip that up.
But that'd let me skip computing questions on platforms I don't run, travel questions for places I've never been, all sorts of stuff that I admit I'm not good at, thus letting me see more of what I want, and it wouldn't impact anyone else (I doubt there'd be much server load if it was pulled from a cookie, though that might not be the best way to do it).

Like I said, I don't want to get presumptuous in this happy moment, but I think it might be a neat way to sort of let people control their own MeFi experience in some way. I just hope it's not too Web 2.0 (and thus rounded-corners and laughed at).
posted by klangklangston at 9:01 PM on February 5, 2007

klangklangston, instead of "deleting" questions you don't want (which could quickly overwhelm the view and turn Ask MeFi into another inbox that must be taken down to zero), try the flip side of the problem.

Click the + sign on anything you're remotely interested when scanning the front page. Then click the My Favorites tab. It's just the things you want, with none of the other stuff and you don't have to click hide 39 times to get it.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:05 PM on February 5, 2007 [1 favorite]

For me a large part of the RSS joy is having it load up in thunderbird as a bunch of email type thingies that I then *can* delete down to just those I'm interested in. That's how I manage to read all the ask.mes in one hit each day while still staying sane. When I'm really busy the category filter will do half the job for me. So yay.
posted by shelleycat at 10:26 PM on February 5, 2007

I think I'd have to click + a lot more times than I'd have to click -, and for that to really work well for me, I'd want the favorites to be split by subsite (so I could keep my MeFi from getting in my peanut butter).

But hey, that's just me. And like I said, I don't want to just be piling on the ponies. Even though MeFi IS all things to all people.
posted by klangklangston at 10:35 PM on February 5, 2007

klangklangston, here are your favorites just on ask mefi. It's a tab, everyone's got it.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:42 PM on February 5, 2007

but then I thought that something that would help make the pages more managable would be taking a page from email and allowing me to delete questions from my view, ideally in batches

Do that in your RSS reader. I do.
posted by delmoi at 10:52 PM on February 5, 2007

Matt, you bring the features more than most communities with full-time staffs *cough*myspace*cough*. Kudos to you.
posted by joshuaconner at 11:09 PM on February 5, 2007

Thanks for adding this.
posted by litlnemo at 3:46 AM on February 6, 2007

on rss feeds.
There are a couple of things I know about and would like to track on metafilter questions. There aren't any questions related to these subjects yet, but I'd like to catch them if they crop up. However, when I try and create a tag feed for those items, I get an error.

e.g. http://ask.metafilter.com/tags/vdf/rss

Just saying.
posted by seanyboy at 5:44 AM on February 6, 2007

I was hoping we'd have that much sought-after "meta-free day" today.
posted by frecklefaerie at 7:25 AM on February 6, 2007

Booooooooo!


















Nah just kidding. This is cool.
posted by Mister_A at 8:04 AM on February 6, 2007

Thank you Matt! This is great, but I seem to have some trouble with the new category feeds I'm subscribed to, using blog lines/Firefox. First, they aren't updated. (I had to set blog lines to "Display items within the last week" after subscribing. No new items showed up. Perhaps this is because nothing has been posted in say, Grab Bag, today but usually when i subscribe to a feed it gives me the latest update as 'unread.' Second, links and other html coding entered by the poster are appearing as code, not as links or formatted text.
posted by pithy comment at 8:34 AM on February 6, 2007

bru writes "Beauty."

Ditto.

Do anyone but Canadians say Beauty! when they think something is good?
posted by Mitheral at 8:35 AM on February 6, 2007

Aussies, Mitheral. As an American, I know this the same way I know anything about Australia: due to my child's obsession with The Wiggles. My wife and I still say "Beauty, mate!" occasionally.
posted by Rock Steady at 8:48 AM on February 6, 2007

I (as an Irishman) say it aswell, but mostly in deference to our Aussie cousins!
posted by TwoWordReview at 9:08 AM on February 6, 2007

I say it, but mostly because of Canadian pop culture references.
posted by cortex at 9:15 AM on February 6, 2007

I mostly say is while ice-skating and drinking liquor on a frozen lake in NJ (true story!) [NOT CANADIANIST]
posted by Mister_A at 9:49 AM on February 6, 2007

pithy comment: It shows the last 25 posts in the feed. No matter what you set bloglines to, you'll only see 25 for now, until a week or two passes and there are many more posts passed through each feed.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:30 AM on February 6, 2007

I say it, but mostly because of Canadian pop culture references.

Take off you hoser.
posted by GuyZero at 12:50 PM on February 6, 2007

I understand the 25 post limit. My feeds, below, have not updated or shown any new posts all day. I subscribed by clicking the orange icon on the page you linked above, using Firefox 2.0's integration with Bloglines. Perhaps I'll try subscribing by pasting the link into Bloglines
# Food & drink (0) (0)
# Grab bag (0) (0)
# Home & garden (0) (0)
# Human relations (0) (0)
# Law & government (0) (0)
# Media & arts (0) (0)
# Religion & philosophy (0) (0)
# Society & culture (0) (0)
# Travel & transportation (0) (0)
# Writing & language (0) (0)

posted by pithy comment at 2:40 PM on February 6, 2007

Nifty!
posted by deborah at 2:51 PM on February 6, 2007

Very nice! I was going to suggest that maybe customizable feeds would be a good next step since I'd like to subscribe to probably 80% of the feeds, but don't want to clutter my feed list with 8 different feeds instead of a single AskMe one.

I think, however, that this might be more a limitation of my newsreader than the new site functionality; I use the Sage Extension for Firefox where each feed is listed separately in the sidebar; is there any way to customize Sage so that clicking on my AskMe feed will pull the results of several different feeds, or can anyone recommend an alternative mechanism (other than a standalone RSS application) that can collapse multiple feeds into a single feed?
posted by Doofus Magoo at 4:47 PM on February 6, 2007

Awesome. Thanks, Matt.

If people don't like having multiple feeds in their reader, you can use a service like FeedRinse or FeedShake to combine the feeds which interest you into one RSS feed.
posted by blag at 5:11 PM on February 6, 2007

Any way this functionality could come over to MeTa, too?

(for following meetup events, since I invariably see the posting the day after the meetup)
posted by heydanno at 4:20 PM on February 13, 2007

Any way this functionality could come over to MeTa, too?

(for following meetup events, since I invariably see the posting the day after the meetup)

Seconding this; it would be good for teh meetups.
posted by grobstein at 10:55 PM on February 24, 2007