Consolidated feeds

[Danny Ayers <danny.ayers@xxxxxxxxx>]

I don't think this has come up before, a possible trick in the general
region of introspection, scenario -

    [John, Jane and Julie are friends but have separate blogging systems]

   client is subscribed to John and Jane's feeds

   client goes to subscribe to Julie's feed

   server responds "I also have a feed containing John + Jane + Julie"

   client subscribes to feed containing John + Jane + Julie

   client drops subscription to John, Jane

I think we have suitable bits in the format to create the aggregated
feed, all this would need is for the server to somehow advertise the
fact that it had a feed containing other feeds, should be a simple
'introspection' file kind of job -

http://julie.org/jjj.atom
   contains entries from
      http://julie.org/feed.atom
      http://john.org/feed.atom
      http://jane.org/feed.atom 

I'm giving the scenario with John, Jane and Julie as friends but on
different servers to suggest separate content management systems
coordinating to provide a kind of small-scale peering.

I'm guesssing significant bandwidth reduction could be offered by
Bloglines/PubSub style caches, though more complicated handshaking
would be needed to allow the client to say "I would like to subscribe
to X, Y, Z". I'm guessing that this kind of thing is already exposed
in APIs in one form or another, but if the request/response was
expressed in Atom it would help clients consolidate automatically.

Cheers,
Danny.

-- 

http://dannyayers.com