Feed-a-tastic | A rant on RSS

I have always known about RSS feeds although I had always preferred the old fashioned ‘look it up yourself’. But with my continual work on Lifhaus, I felt I needed to add RSS feeds onto Lifhaus. I was of the opinion that our two leading newspapers would have RSS enabled on their websites. How wrong I was! No RSS available on www.solomonstarnews.com and neither is there one on www.solomontimes.com[NOTE: Solomon Times does have a RSS feed – thanks Nick]. Even if there was this functionality available, it was not prominent and I was a disappointed.

So I headed off to www.oceaniafootball.com and added a feed directly on Lifhaus. I just had to throw some basketball news feeds in there so I pulled it straight off the ESPN NBA Homepage.

I admit I work in spurts, small bursts of inspiration would take me on a totally different path then I would return to my original task. It happened again and I headed off to this blog looking to add some feeds on Lifhaus. That bright orange icon was visibly absent; I panicked and headed off to the admin interface scouring all the options there. Nothing – at least nothing I could easily see so I searched the WordPress Forum and the simplest answer was, WordPress has it by default and if it does not show on the theme, the address bar of the browser should have it. Sure enough, it was there. All the more reasons why I love WordPress; it works great out of the box! The promise Mac gave me when I bought my iMac – I am a happier man because of that.

However, on second thoughts, I decided not to add any RSS feeds from this blog to Lifhaus as it would probably be ‘self-promotion’. But here are some of my inspirations after this little episode.

1. Lifhaus was built on Drupal. I installed Web Links, a blogroll module. I would love to see some integration of this module with RSS. So when users click on a URL in the blogroll it should collapse and reveal the latest feed from that blog or URL. For those URL/blogs without RSS enabled, the user can be taken directly to the website.

2. Perhaps using CCK and Views, I will be able to create a block for each registered user on Lifhaus to display RSS feeds on their own Profile page. I would love to investigate that further.

3. Promote the use of RSS for all local high traffic website. I could start with the two newspaper sites I have already mentioned.

4. RSS for comments of discussion forums would be very handy. Using that, I could aggregate all latest or popular discussions from local websites with discussion forums all on Lifhaus. Thats a big ask, at least for now, that no one is using RSS in the first place.

Finally, web development in the Solomon Islands still has a long way to go. But I believe with persistence and some patience, those of us who strongly advocate for its advancement will one day, hopefully soon, see the web take off in the Solomon Islands.