Rss Feed?

[EricJD]

Hi,

 

Does Geocaching.com have any sort of RSS feed to watch the cache lists and see when new ones are posted without actually visiting the website?

 

If not, I think it would be cool if you guys could implement one.

[+Ed & Julie]

I don't believe an RSS feed like you want exsists, but...

 

As a premium member, one of the many benifits are instant notifications when a new cache is approved in your area.

 

Ed

TB&TB

[ju66l3r]

I talked with Jeremy about this recently.

 

The biggest problem is that it would need to be an RSS that access a dynamic list of caches (in other words, your RSS reader asks Geocaching.com if there is anything new to report, and it has to do a database search to get the list of caches near you before it can say yes/no).

 

Since it has to do that lookup and people can potentially set their readers to query every minute or worse, there needs to be a way for GC.com to potentially tell greedy readers that there's nothing new in order to keep the bandwidth down (instead of reporting the fresh search results file each time and letting the reader decide if anything is new). That's not so easy with dynamic content.

 

Last I heard, Jeremy was taking a look at some of the links I sent him for workarounds..but unfortunately I wasn't able to find him an out-of-the-box software solution because most sites with dynamic content have been willing to use a work-around in their website software instead of their RSS software...so it's a little hacky.

[robertlipe]

Since it has to do that lookup and people can potentially set their readers to query every minute or worse, there needs to be a way for GC.com to potentially tell greedy readers that there's nothing new in order to keep the bandwidth down (instead of reporting the fresh search results file each time and letting the reader decide if anything is new). That's not so easy with dynamic content.

 

Last I heard, Jeremy was taking a look at some of the links I sent him for workarounds..but unfortunately I wasn't able to find him an out-of-the-box software solution because most sites with dynamic content have been willing to use a work-around in their website software instead of their RSS software...so it's a little hacky.

But isn't the point of RSS that it doesn't require state on the server but doesn't have to be stateless under the cover? The client can request the newest N caches every 2 seconds (shame on it) but the server doesn't actually have to update the RSS any more often than it feels like it. It's free to hand back the same RSS every time.

 

So if I requested an RSS feed of the newest N caches of my pocket query numbered P every 4 seconds (and I chose PQ in this example becuase that encourages it to be a MO thing, tied to a reasonable selection interface, and -most importantly- it ties it to a finite trackable resource within the Groundspeak compound) the server could easily do a lookup of P, see that it hasn't hit its min refresh time and doesn't have to bother with that annoying database stuff; it can return the cached copy if it chooses to return anything at all. Plus, you can bump a "rudness" counter on P that could then be used to see that it gets a place in the back of the line anway if you wanted to break the 2 second crowd.

 

Right?

 

(The bonus round of optimizations could retain a timestamp on the last scan of P, and look for published, temp disabled, or retraction notes inside the selection set since that timestamp. If if found none, the RSS may not need to change at all.)

 

Dynamic content doesn't mean you have to let the readers slap you senseless. The site has plenty of art for this "please hammer, don't hurt me" logic including the page throttling and the "one a day" logic in the PQs.

[+Yamar]

Sort of related: I did create RSS feeds for forums topics, if you're interested...

 

http://geocaching.sharedlists.com/

 

I'm only watching two forums at the moment though. adding more wouldn't take much (and I'd be happy to distribute the perl/procmail script that does this).