I just added a whole load of extra metadata and content to my RSS 1.0 feed (RDF). So first thing which you will notice is comments and trackbacks are added so there is no need to visit the XHTML site unless you actually want to comment back and even then you could use the WFW:comment system, which I honestly have never really looked into. I also added a comment count before the actual comments, so you can skip around the RSS easily. This will also mean I need to get harsh with spam as I dont want spam in my RSS too. So I'm turning off trackback autodiscovery if I get any more spam.
Then I added the Creative commons licence to my RSS feed, which was easy enough. Ben Hammersley has a complete guide on how to do this with RSS 1.0. But this is where I got stuck, I was listening to some podcasts from Northern voice and heard Stephen Downes' Community Blogging session which talked about alot of things to do with the longtail, tags, metadata and emergence. But he also suggested people should link or put FOAF content into there RSS feeds. And I just thought this was fantastic! It makes so much sense, so I went about trying to link my FOAF profile into my RSS 1.0 feed. Well its not as easy it would first seem. I tried to work out how to link rather than just add FOAF to directly into the RSS. And in the end came up with this.
< foaf
erson rdf:ID=”Ian Forrester” >
< rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="http://adrenalin-online.demon.co.uk/profile/foaf.rdf"/ >
< /foaf
Which sits in the channel block. While this may not be ideal, its seems better than anything else i've seen. Now if I can only get feedburner to pass on the feed without interfering with the metadata.
Update – My friend David showed me evidance that my new changes to the RSS feeds are causing problems. So I've decided i'm going to remove the extra comment and trackback fuctionality from the RSS 2.0 and ATOM versions. Which means if you subscribe to the RSS 1.0 version, you will get trackbacks, comments and lots of other juicy bits and bobs. The change back should happen tonight which will be the morning of the 2nd March for most of you. Till then, my feedburner one is still turning out standard RSS combined with my bookmarks. Thanks David, if anyone else is having problems please leave a comment…
