Dale's Weblog

Archive system + comments on RSS

I’ve just done a rework of my "Short Archive". It now does things much more nicely.

Have a look:
http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/

The code behind it isn’t great. I’ve chosen to use unix timestamps as my way of logging when posts are made. This is great for changing the layout of the time output if needed but makes it much harder to sort each post into a group (for example month by month). This is because a unix timestamp is the number of seconds since 1st Jan 1970 and each month/day/year etc isn’t uniform. I’ve done a bit of work and the system seems to work well, although the code isn’t what I’d call nice. Wordpress doesn’t even use timestamps (probably because of the problem I found, although unsure). Feel free to let me know ;)

Do please try and break my archive, I want to find bugs in it. Type lots of junk etc.

On another comment I was reading:
http://www.matthom.com/archive/2004/09/01/01/

Which talks about how RSS should work:

When I scan headlines and entries of over 100 feeds that I check daily, how do I know which ones are worth reading? Sometimes, it’s hard to tell. Feeds that provide a summary, over an intro, are the ones that are a better use of my time, and help me decide whether to read further, or to skip to the next feed.

My RSS just gives the first few words before it chops it off. You’d have to setup a system in which when you posted a summary about the news item as well. You wouldn’t be able to use an automated system.
A good read there.

This reminds me, this is what trackback should be used for! Unfortunately my site currently cannot send trackbacks (although you can send one to here) and the site in which I got this from doesn’t support it either. I shall look into writing a sending feature.