Lambda the Ultimate

So, I set up Aaron's RSS to Email Aggregator and had a go... It worked great, except for two flaws, one major and one minor... So now I'm wondering if there's anything I can do to get this working.

The major flaw is that the RSS feed seems only to include the front page... My usual MO is to read the posts in the discussion group as they come in, in order, and use the link coloring in my browser to tell me which ones I've read. Ideally, I'd like to convert every individual post to an email. Is there another RSS feed which includes all the discussion, or if not, would it be possible to set one up? I'm a total newb when it comes to RSS, so I have no idea whether this is reasonable... But I do know that an RSS feed of just the front page posts is pretty much useless to me...

Second, the minor flaw... The RSS feed doesn't seem to include dates and times for each post. Since my script would grab the feed periodically, I'd like the feed to include date info so I can convert that to a reasonable Date header for me emails. Is there any way we could get the date and time of each post into the RSS feed? Obviously, this is contingent on the major flaw being addressed... Otherwise, I won't be using the feed in any case.

As I said this is all brand new to me, so I hope I haven't overlooked something obvious.

As to your comments:

The RSS feed includes a guid for each news item. These guids look like this message8095.html. You can extract the date (and sequential order within each date) from these URLs.

I don't think it is possible at the moment to syndicate the discussion group (I spent the last half hour trying). The option appears on the preferences menu for the site (which is available to me as the "managing editor" in Manila-speak), but it doesn't seem to create an RSS file. It seems like this is a new feature of Forntier 9.1, which Userland isn't deploying on the free hosting servers (that's a guess. If someone knows more, let me know).

By the way, I kind of like the semi-moderated nature LtU has, where only some of the messages appear on the home page and in the RSS feed. I understand why people want RSS feeds with comments, but my MO (for most other sites as well) is to just to the site, if I want to follow the disucssion for any particular news item.

These days the LtU discussion group is interesting enough to warrant its own feed though.

This is a totally reasonable way to use the site, but my main gripe with web discussion boards as opposed to more traditional internet discussion formats is that they tend to impose one person's viewing/navigation preferences on the whole group, while email and news allow each reader to organize and navigate threads however she likes (up to, of course, the limits of her software and ingenuity).

In my ideal system, there would be an email list and a web discussion, and they would be kept fully in sync so that changes on the web would go out via email, and new email messages would be added to the site. I've never understood why there seems to be such a wide gulf between the two communities/technologies. Personally, I'd always rather be using my own text editor than a browser's text field widget...

Anyway, for now I may rig up some HTML screen-scraping thing to convert the discussion to email. If I do get something together I'll post it here. If it does become possible to produce an RSS feed of the discussion, though, please let us know!

LtU, however, is an idealized anarachy. There are more than ten editors that can post to the home page, on what ever they think is relevant. We tend to restrict these psots to links to papers and so on, and keep the debates in the disucssion group.

I almost never turn down a LtU regular who wants to become a contributing editor, in fact I encourage more to participate. So there's a wide range of opinions and styles.

This ends the community service announcement...

Would the email include the actual message, or just a link?

Even so, it would be useful and I would definitely subscribe to such a list...