MetaRSS: The Open Source Project
It’s no secret: MetaRSS was hacked together with the best of intentions in the least amount of time possible. As such, MetaRSS went live in alpha and never saw much further development. Since that time, the name has been taken by another company, several bugs have been discovered (more on that later), reported, and fixed. Given that there is, at the very least, a modicum of interest in extensible RSS feeds for Metafilter, and little promise that they’ll actually show up as a feature, I’ve decided to put the code out there.
Perhaps the project is too small of a niche to stir up much, if any, interest in the community, but I can’t know until I make the effort. Therefore, I have submitted a project proposal to sourceFORGE.net for hosting the repository and related collaborative tools. Though the project hasn’t been accepted yet, I’m going to begin to lay the groundwork so that when it finally does gain approval, we can hit the ground running.
First, let me take a few minutes to explain what MetaRSS does and should do. Currently, it provides RSS feeds for the main properties and indivudal threads in such a manner that reduces load on the MeFi servers to one hit, per feed, per hour. (With Matt’s permission, I’d be interested in increasing the frequency.) In the future, MetaRSS should provide per user and per generic search feeds, as well as other specialty feeds.
In addition to providing generic RSS feeds, MetaRSS caused me to look into FeedBurner’s API and an RSS splicer. It seems to me that providing integration of these services would add to the value of the product over all. The way I see it, MetaRSS should handle front-end requests for feed creation, splicing, and customization, as well as do all of the feed creation, but FeedBurner should bear the brunt of serving the actual feeds.
Clearly, this description isn’t even remotely close to a spec. It’s just a general description of the state of things as they are now and as I hope them to be. In the end, if a community of develipers emerge, the product will open to consensus development. The features that the developers and users have the most interest in will drive the development, not me. The code and the product will be free to all, though I should note that Matt has a significant say in all of this, despite remaining silent thus far.