[PLUG-TALK] Calagator RSS feed

Daniel Hedlund daniel at digitree.org
Sat Jan 16 22:19:48 UTC 2016


On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 10:24 AM, Keith Lofstrom <keithl at kl-ic.com> wrote:

> Why oh why is the Calagator RSS feed in event creation order
> rather than event calendar order?
>

The Atom/RSS feed has been this way for as long as I have known about the
the project.  RSS and Atom are not designed to be used as calendars, having
no concept of start and end dates.  Their choice to set the published dated
to the event's creation date is in line with what I would expect for a
feed; calendar events are published on the site as soon as they are
created.  Some readers will keep a checksum of the content of a feed entry
and, when that checksum changes on subsequent requests to the feed, they
will redisplay that entry at the top of the feed as if it was new.

Members of the calagator community have taken advantage of this behavior to
keep an eye out for spam events or malicious changes to upcoming events;
this is the primary method that the community uses for keeping the site
usable for the rest of us.  It may not be the best experience to expose the
atom feed as a link on the main events page without additional information
about its intended use or limitations.


My (admittedly untrustworthy) memory is that Calagator RSS
> used to be in calendar order.  But then, my memory used to
> be good enough that I did not need Calagator RSS to keep
> track of what is happening over the next few days.
>

If you were using a reader that always displayed feed entries in the same
order returned by the server, it would have displayed the calendar in the
order you're describing.

Calagator also has built-in support for hCalendar, which provides basic
support for embedding event information inside Atom feeds; Calagator
provides support for both 1.0 standard (
http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar) and newer (
http://microformats.org/wiki/h-event).  If you were using a reader that
supported these formats then it would also have the ability to display
events in the correct order.  protopage.com might have not have support for
these formats, or require additional configuration.


I can imagine why a version of RSS used for debugging might
>
list events in entry order, and why "R", the Calagator
> maintainer who "answered" and dismissed my complaint on the
> github bug list, would claim that this is the best way for
> the RSS to function.  But most neurotypical users may prefer
> an actual calendar, perhaps provided by a separate RSS feed.
>

"R" has done an amazing job in keeping the project alive, maintained.  It
has been used as a catalyst for getting a lot of new people involved in the
local community, open source, and civic activities.  Some parts of the code
base could use more love, but like most open source projects, is driven by
volunteer.  I think the only problem was that your question was answered
very literally with an explanation about the original question you asked,
and not considering what your intent for wanting to use the feed for was;
if intent was taken into consideration, and he had enough time to respond
to your question more thoroughly, he might have mentioned the hCalendar
standard support they have in the feed that is meant to support your use
case.
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