Pasting in the mail I sent to Paul yesterday. Not sure if it'll make it into the official releases, so I thought I'd post it here in case others find it useful:
It had been bugging me for a while that news.yc doesn't produce a proper RSS feed. The notable problems are:
- Doesn't include a published time, so articles aren't sorted properly
- Items that fall off the front-page and then come back are duplicated in the feed
- Sort order is wrong since it should be most recent articles first
So, I patch the news.yc to generate a proper feed. The diff is attached. My lisp-fu is more than a little rusty, so there may be some non-lisp-programmer brain-damage in there.
Basics are:
- Implemented a unix time to UTC converter to convert the timestamps to RSS-able UTC timestamps.
- Add pubDate and guid tags to each post.
- Add a new field for stories that indicates if they've every been part of the RSS feed and write that to their disk records.
- If they have, and are in the top ntopstories + 10, continue to include them in the feed (this should prevent the dropping out and coming back).
Things that are probably wrong:
- I wasn't sure what the significance of * at the end of variables was. Global scope?
- I added a (gen-topstories) to the beginning of the RSS generator, which I presume is wrong for performance reasons, but was needed to make the right entries come back; wasn't sure what the correct thing to do there was.
Slightly off topic, but has anything happened with this patch yet? I found this post because I was interested in making a few improvements myself, but now I'm wondering if patches are actually being applied to the news.yc code.
Relatedly, is there a current source available for news.arc? I found the version included with arc2.tar, but it doesn't look to have been modified in a long time. I might as well start looking at the current version if it's available.
