RSS Feeds - how should they work? How are they working for you?

Hmm. We can't edit "starting posts", only comments? Ah well. The bullets and paragraph breaks above look a little different from what I expected.

And is this called V4? I put "V4 bugs" in the tag, anyway.

all rss feeds seem to be working properly now :)

Hi again phil... do so few people use the RSS feeds?! I'm a little surprised--those feeds matter far more to me than layouts or color schemes.

The new set-up for the RSS feeds looks potentially great: in the Conversations Tab, when you use the pull-down menu to select conversations (All, My, User, Lesson, Extra, Grammar, Glossary), the RSS icon URL actually changes--each one has a different feed, ending in /all, /lesson, /glossary... However, currently each feed is giving exactly the same stream (or nothing at all). It seems to be for all Lesson or User conversations, but not the newer Glossary and Grammar conversations. 

As far as I can tell the big feeds are "working" in that we are informed whenever a thread has a new post. Unfortunately, we're only given the first (often years-old) post in that thread, not the new one, and the links are broken so following up is near-impossible.

There's an additional RSS icon within each User or Lesson conversation, and those ARE working properly: I'll see the author and the post content, and the link takes me through. However, it does seem to be working with quite a delay--in NetNewsWire I'll get items hours later. At least now I'm no longer in a weird time warp where I'll get items hours later, but somehow they'll be date-stamped 12 hours into the future (and that wasn't a time zone issue, since I'm in Taiwan and NOWHERE is 12 hours ahead of Taiwan).

The new date-stamp issue: they're all given the time that my feed reader "refreshed" them into the feed. They're not given the time originally posted.

I assume this is all still a work-in-progress, and that's fine - these transitions take a lot of work! - but I'd like to have some confirmation that the problems are recognized and being worked on.

(As I type this I'm missing the expandable comments box...)

Lost in Asia,

you said:

but I'd like to have some confirmation that the problems are recognized and being worked on.

I agree, that this is the major frustration but maybe try this - on the Me page or home page they (cpod) have asked for all comments and issues to be listed on links given (which lead to the new features thread started by John I believe). If all complaints are listed in the one place that they have requested, perhaps there is a better chance it will get read and responded to. Its worth a shot. I would hope they realize that responding is important. Anyway that would be the best system. Post all in one place and have some assurance that they are being read and responded to.

As for the feeds, I use them but not to the extent you do. I only ask for the lessons and fixes, QW and DA. My settings were scrambled during the change but after correcting these I have had no issues yet. I took your word that the RSS feed URL was different and repasted it but I did not check to see if it had really changed. Its hard to imagine they would not tell us if that changed. Anyway I repasted and all is well so far.

RJ

Hi rjberki,

Thanks for the tips - I did actually bring this up in the monster "New Features" thread, but it didn't seem to be acknowledged (although I may have missed it, at 260+ comments).

I guess I should distinguish between the different feeds - the iTunes/ lesson feed and the different conversations feeds (are these all RSS? I have no idea). I'm certainly getting all of the lessons now, in iTunes (where it really matters), and also in an RSS reader. What I'm not getting are comments feeds.

Basically I tend to quickly scan comments in NetNewsWire or NetVibes, without ever needing to open the different Lesson pages. The RSS URLs that changed are related to comments/ conversations feeds, not iTunes/ lesson MP3s.

Actually one other reason I started this in a new thread is "advertising" - some people may not know about using RSS newsreaders to go through comments and conversations. They're great for seeing anything that's been posted anywhere on the site; you don't have to open up umpteen lessons to see if anything's been added. (Although apparently speed HAS improved, so loading pages to look at comments no longer takes as much time.)

I'm especially curious about how the Conversations will work in the new Glossary and Grammar sections - there should be lots of worthwhile discussions about usage (and abusage).

Hi LostinAsia,

Seems like you and me again for RSS feeds. I made a comment in JP's main upgrade thread but no response. I have a few problems too:

1. To begin with the feeds just dried up since they changed the URL again without informing us. I am now using the URL from the RSS icon next to the Conversations selection drop down box with All Conversations selected. Not sure if that is right but it was all I could find?

2. I am receiving very few feeds (20 or so per day) and what I do receive are mostly the brief lesson intros rather than the posts below the intro

3. I can see no logic to which few posts that do appear from the user conversations

4. If I click on a post it takes me to my Bloglines home page

5. There are no authors shown as there used to be

I am using Firefox 3 RC1 and Bloglines Beta

lostinasia, are you still having the same problems with the community/lesson RSS feeds? I am having all of the problems you listed and it's the main reason I don't come to ChinesePod as much as I would like to.

For example, it's just a needless extra step if I want to reply to a comment I read in my RSS reader to have to manually come to the ChinesePod site and search for that conversation if I want to reply. In practical terms, I find it impossible to keep up with conversations via the RSS feeds.

Another thing I noticed is the individual group feeds include conversations that are not actually posted to that group.

weijin, I hadn't checked the RSS feeds in months since I'd totally given up on any improvement. However, after seeing your post, I tried again using NetNewsWire, and at the moment it seems like they mostly ARE working properly. (But I remember before phil and I were getting different results in different newsreaders.)

The group RSS feeds aren't working for me, however. I seem to able to follow individual conversations within groups, but not "Group blogs."

I'm surprised I even noticed this post--I don't spend much time in the community these days, because I just feel like I'm snowed under. Perhaps that's for the best, since I'm not sure how much Community-time really helps my Chinese.

weijin, lostinasia,

I also haven't spent much time in the community lately (due to the RSS problem) and had given up any hope of improvement. It's a shame beacause I found it very quick and convenient to glance through the all conversations feed compared with clicking around the main site. However I do check now and again. My "all conversations" feed still has the same problem but I recently set up a few individual feeds, john, amber, jenny, bazza etc in the hope that I might pick up the threads of some newsworthy items. They seem to be working fine in Bloglines.

I've stopped subscribing to the 'all conversations' feed now and just subscribe to specific convos and people i want to follow - this seems to be working properly. Phil，谢谢你的建议。

Lost in Asia,

how about a short tutorial on how to use these features? NetNewsWire etc to read posts. Where do you find the URL's for these feeds and how do you set this up. I am assuming these are websites or is this just for mobile devices? I do not find using the community board too labor intensive but would like to try your technique.

RJ