[MOBY-l] [moby] RSS feeds for objects and services

[Mark Wilkinson]

On Fri, 2006-02-17 at 11:10 -0600, Twigger Simon wrote:
> Are these meant to  
> be a list of all current services/objects or do things appear on  
> there only when they are new? Mark, I see the feeds are coming from  
> your group so I was wondering if you could let me know how this is  
> meant to work?

The feeds are updated daily, and contain the list of services/objects
registered in the previous 24 hours


> I wasnt sure if this was broken or if they are functioning correctly  
> and there's just nothing there. I'd quite like it to return all the  
> current services and objects, then if I subscribe I would think that  
> new services/objects would pop up in my newsreader as new 'stories'  
> so I would be alerted to them.

It does work that way, except that it works only in 4 hour blocks.

I can change that behaviour if you like.  It's just a matter of changing
">" to ">>" when I write to the file. 

Some RSS readers will be able to figure out which "stories" are old and
which are new, but I'm not sure if all of them can.  Some people might
end up with a massive list of entities that they can't get rid of if we
simply concatenate.


>  If having it return everything is  
> unwieldy, maybe have it return the 10 newest services or objects,  

Now that we have timestamps on our LSID's it would be possible to do
this, though it is a bit more effort (a.k.a. will take longer for me to
code-up).  The only way to determine which things were new so far has
been to do a diff against the dump of the previous day - if there were
no new services, the feed was blank.  In principle, it would be possible
now to work out which services are the most recent by examining the LSID
timestamp, and publish those ones to the feed.

M


-- 
--
...his last words were 'Hey guys!  Watch this!'
--
Mark Wilkinson
Asst. Professor
Dept. of Medical Genetics
University of British Columbia
PI in Bioinformatics
iCAPTURE Centre
St. Paul's Hospital
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