Chief Technical Officer
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The alert ones among you may have noticed a plethora of little orange icons appearing on the site today. These are our new RSS feeds (well, technically, they're atom feeds... but you shouldn't need to think about that).
We now have literally tens of thousands of feeds to help you keep up with the goings-on that interest you at paizo.com. In the store section of the site, you can now subscribe to new, upcoming, and top-selling product listings for pretty much any grouping of products. (Want to see upcoming releases for D&D? Go to a page like http://paizo.com/store/brand/dungeonsDragons/ and subscribe to the feed.)
In the messageboards, you can track threads, forums, and, by clicking on the names of posters, even individual users. (Want to see what Erik Mona's been talking about on the boards? Go to his page and get the feed.)
In addition to all those, you can get feeds for the store blog, recent product reviews, and even stuff like the Dungeon Downloads page, so you can easily find out when a new online supplement has been added.
Not familiar with RSS at all? Here are some links you might find useful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)
http://waldo.jaquith.org/blog/2006/01/rss-intro/
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,111699-page,1/article.html
http://lawdawglib.blogspot.com/2005/02/what-is-site-or-rss-feed.html
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Senior Software Developer
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A few notes about the feeds, for those who are curious.
If your feed reader doesn't understand Atom feeds, you can change the "&xml=atom" to "&xml=rss" to get feeds in RSS 2.0 format. (If you don't know what that is, don't worry!)
Most of the feeds are designed to give you the most recent 25 whatevers (posts, threads, etc.), or if there's been more activity in the past 24 hours, everything added in the last day. (Thank you to Vic for this insight.) That way, if you refresh the feed at least once a day, you can be sure that you're seeing everything that's happening in the thread or forum you're interested in.
You can actually subscribe to a feed of reviews for a product, though we don't provide links or advertise that fact. If you want that kind of feed, click on a product, then add "&xml=atom" to the URL to get the feed. (This feature is mainly for Paizo employees so we can be up to date on reviews of our products. It's probably not particularly valuable for anyone else, which is why we don't advertise the feed. But if you're a publisher of a given product I suppose it might be useful.)
We wanted to provide feeds of all new posts to top-level forums like the Dungeon messageboards, including all new posts to any thread anywhere, but we have too many new posts per day to make that practical.
Great job! one of the features I was really looking forward to.
I can finally subscribe to threads and forums! excellent!.
I've been making a whole paizo tab on my google homepage. This stuff is very cool!.
one thing I noticed: The feed on people (e.g. feed:http://paizo.com/people/ErikMona&xml=atom) doesn't seem to work. Any idea why that is?
Hmm. It's not broken for me, using NetNewsWire Lite. Our other feeds work OK on your Google homepage?one thing I noticed: The feed on people (e.g. feed:http://paizo.com/people/ErikMona&xml=atom) doesn't seem to work. Any idea why that is?
I'd love to use these RSS feeds, but I can't figure out how to make these links work in Firefox. On other websites (NYTimes, for just one example), the orange icon appears in the address bar of my browser. I grab it, drag it to my toolbar, and I've got instant access to the RSS feed forever thereafter. It's really easy and useful.
That orange box doesn't appear on the address bar at Paizo. When I click on the orange boxes in the pages on Paizo, I get a message that Firefox doesn't know what to do with it. When I try create a 'live bookmark' using the link info, it doesn't work, either.
Correction: That happy little easy-to-use icon does appear in my address bar on just about every page in the Paizo website EXCEPT the Author pages.
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Chief Technical Officer
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I've been making a whole paizo tab on my google homepage. This stuff is very cool!.
one thing I noticed: The feed on people (e.g. feed:http://paizo.com/people/ErikMona&xml=atom) doesn't seem to work. Any idea why that is?
Let me start off saying I haven't tried a google homepage (I like my google page barren), but the url you're using is nonstandard—it includes two protocols.
http://paizo.com/people/ErikMona&xml=atom is legal (and is what we're generating),
and feed://paizo.com/people/ErikMona&xml=atom is legal (but might not be commonly understood),
but feed:http://paizo.com/people/ErikMona&xml=atom is a Frankenstein (but maybe that's ok with google—I don't know).
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Senior Software Developer
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feed:http://paizo.com/people/ErikMona&xml=atom
Actually that's a valid feed URI according to the proposed spec.
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Ok, seems I am too stupid!
I read the wiki, have a downloaded file on my pc (for a thread) and now I have absolutely no clue what that's all about. Maybe because I am not that into computers, html and such stuff... Trying to understand something in a different language than your own about a topic you have no clue about is a bit, well, hard! ;)
What do I do with the downloaded file? Do I need a special programm do make use of those RSS, atoms, or whatever they're called!?
Everybody seems to go crazy with this new addition to "our" boards and I want to be crazy too! Anyone who can explain it to me???
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Chief Technical Officer
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feed:http://paizo.com/people/ErikMona&xml=atomActually that's a valid feed URI according to the proposed spec.
WHAT? I declare the whole thing silly, then. RIP IT ALL OUT!
On second thought, I guess that spec is useful to differentiate http: from https:.
I suppose it can stay.
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Chief Technical Officer
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Do I need a special programm do make use of those RSS, atoms, or whatever they're called!?
You might have better luck with the second link we listed, which is a little easier to understand than the wiki, and has some software notes:
http://waldo.jaquith.org/blog/2006/01/rss-intro/
-Vic.
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Chief Technical Officer
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Correction: That happy little easy-to-use icon does appear in my address bar on just about every page in the Paizo website EXCEPT the Author pages.
Hmm. It looks like we're serving the user page feed as "feed:http:", while all the other ones are being served up as just "http:". So, valid or not, it looks like the Frankenstein is confusing at least two pieces of software.... We'll explore further and fix it, but in the meantime, just edit the "feed:" off of the beginning of the URLs so they just start with "http:".
-Vic.
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Senior Software Developer
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Hmm. It looks like we're serving the user page feed as "feed:http:", while all the other ones are being served up as just "http:". So, valid or not, it looks like the Frankenstein is confusing at least two pieces of software.... We'll explore further and fix it, but in the meantime, just edit the "feed:" off of the beginning of the URLs so they just start with "http:".
I've fixed it so we're no longer using "feed:http://" for the People feeds.
This particular feed here only shows new topics, not new replies. I don't know if this was intentional or not, but here it be. (It's the front page Messageboard RSS link.)
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Senior Software Developer
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Yeah, feeds for forums which contain other forums (like General or Dragon) only contain new threads. Feeds for forums which contain threads (like Website Feedback) contain all new threads and posts.
The reason it's this way is that we include every new post or thread in the past 24 hours in a feed, and we get way too many new threads and posts per day to do that on a top-level forum.
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Hi there,
I just started to personalize my google start page. I was looking for Paizo feeds displaying new messages on the message boards. Unfortunately the only two feeds showing up (search word "Paizo") don't work. I just get error messages.
I would like to add feed addresse of my own, but I didn't find any way to add feeds of my own to the ones already availabe at google.com.
Does anybody know how to add feed addresse of your own?
Or alternatively: does the web site staff of Paizo know why the two Paizo feeds offered don't work?
Thanks for your efforts,
Günther
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Hi again,
I am still wondering how to make Paizo feeds work on my personalized google starting page.
There is a huge amount of feeds there to select from. One of them is even a Paizo one. Unfortunately it points to rather uninteresting content - and even worse: it doesn't work.
Does anyone know how to insert feeds of your own choice to Google starting pages? Or could you guys at Paizo influence Google to offer some more (preferably unbroken) Paizo feeds?
Thanks in advance for your advice!
Günther
Guennarr -
Here's how I did it.
1.) Go to your Google Homepage.
2.) Click on "Add more to this page >>" (upper left corner).
3.) At the top of the page, you'll see a Google search bar. Right next to the "Search Homepage Content" button, there's a smaller link that says "Add by URL." Click on it.
4.) Copy the link address for the feed that you're interested in into the box.
5.) Click on "Add." It could take a few seconds at this point, so be patient. :)
You should now get a feedbox on your Google homepage.
You may already be aware of this, but the feed links at the top of the Pathfinder blog page are a little wonky.
Yeah, those'll be fixed once I finish the blog software rewrite. First I'm focusing on bugs with ongoing month-to-month subscriptions, making the transition page smarter and teaching the My Subscriptions page more about ongoing subscriptions.
(What, you're doing important, paying stuff first? Curse your money-grubbing corporate priorities.)
I tried adding the paizo blog to my firefox browser.
http://paizo.com/paizo/blog&xml=atom
It never comes up with anything. So I tried
http://paizo.com/paizo/blog&xml=rss
and the most recent entry was April 26, so stuff is missing. Wierd.
I really just want the Pathfinder blog though, so I hope you can get that feed going soon.
Thanks
I'm actually trying to add it to my.msn.com browser. It says I'm able to add rss files and am able to do for a few things but I have as yet been unable to get any of paizo's to work.
Any help would be welcomed.
I'm actually trying to add it to my.msn.com browser. It says I'm able to add rss files and am able to do for a few things but I have as yet been unable to get any of paizo's to work.
Any help would be welcomed.
Bump
...We don't have any experience with my.msn.com, but if that doesn't work, perhaps someone at msn can help you?
I was told that Paizo was not indexed. As of how to fix this I do not know.
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Chief Technical Officer
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...We don't have any experience with my.msn.com, but if that doesn't work, perhaps someone at msn can help you?I was told that Paizo was not indexed. As of how to fix this I do not know.
If they're saying what I think they're saying, that means they need to send a bot over to digest our feeds, which means it's up to them.
Okay, Thanks for the help Vic. I'll harp on them till they get it done.
... and teaching the My Subscriptions page more about ongoing subscriptions.
Give it lots of homework.
hHAhahHAhHAHHAHAhaHAhAhaaha...he...heha.... cough!
Ok, not funny.