[pmwiki-users] Newbie re: RSS

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Wed, Jun 14, 2006 at 11:55:47PM -0500, Chris Cox wrote:
> Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> > On Wed, Jun 14, 2006 at 10:19:58AM -0500, Glenn Blalock wrote:
> >> I want users to be able to use an aggregator to see changes on a particular
> >> trail:
> >> I see only the Group / Page information and a date, with a link to see
> >> original item.  What I was hoping would happen is that I would see some
> >> summary of the text on the particular pages in the trail, perhaps the text
> >> that I've added, etc.  
> > 
> > Yes, I'd be hoping to see that as well.   Unfortunately, I haven't
> > figured out a good way to automatically summarize the text of the page,
> > or even to summarize the recent edits to the page.  I'm very open
> > for suggestions on this.
> > 
> >> Is there a way for me to provide the feed with information from that pages,
> >> other than the title and a link to the original?
> > 
> > ?action=rss will report the value of any (:description ...:) markup that
> > happens to be in the pages.
> 
> Cool..   Maybe description could also default to including para=1 or
> lines=5 or something (output in some reasonable fashion appropriate
> for rss) if no data is supplied.  

At one point in the 2.1 beta sequence I experimented with automatically
extracting the first paragraph of text into a description page
variable... but I didn't like how it turned out much.  It went
too far in terms of being 'special case' and not far enough in
terms of being able to support other features (e.g., context-sensitive
excerpts in searches).

So, I'm still looking for good ways to handle this.  At the
moment my best guess is to store the plain-text version of a
page (i.e., with markup stripped) along with the markup, and
use that for various types of excerpting.  But I think doing 
this could also significantly increase the size of pagefiles,
since we're effectively storing the page content twice.

OTOH, a lot of sites would probably not mind the extra storage.

Pm