[Developers] rudamentary RSS!

[Alec Flett]

We have (Finally) implemented some basic RSS feeds. Note that this is 
really just a first cut, and that we are really looking for feedback as 
to what kinds of feeds would be useful.

We've also implemented the feed system to have somewhat predictable URLs 
so that you can construct some of your own feed urls beyond just those 
exposed through <link> tags.

We'll eventually document this, as well as provide a mechanism for full 
MQL queries to be embedded in your RSS feeds so you can make your own feeds.

(Note: as I post this I've just noticed that all the "updated" times on 
the atom entries are somehow set to the date the feed was generated. 
Hopefully this doesn't cause problems with people's feed readers, and 
we'll fix this soon!)

But first things first:

*Inline feeds on pages*
You'll notice that starting today there is an orange RSS box on many 
pages on freebase.com. We provide two basic types of feed content right 
now: 'history' and 'discuss'. Both of these feed types are based on the 
same queries internally, so most history-based RSS feeds can actually be 
translated into corresponding discuss feeds, and vice versa.

For example, take a look at a domain like architecture:
http://www.freebase.com/view/architecture

If you click on the RSS icon in your URL bar, you'll see a number of 
feeds exposed...we have:
- Discussion of all types and topics in 'Architecture'
- Discussion of all types in 'Architecture'
- Discussion about 'Architecture'
- equivalent feeds for History

*URL construction*
If you look at the urls, you'll see they look like this:
http://www.freebase.com/feed/discuss/all/architecture
http://www.freebase.com/feed/discuss/schema/architecture
http://www.freebase.com/feed/discuss/topic/architecture
etc..

If we break this down we see:
- all urls begin with '/feed'
- the second component specifies the content type - history or discuss
- the third component specifies the type of feed. These generally depend 
on the type of the thing you're looking at
- the rest of the url is the id of the topic you're looking at

*Composing your own feeds*
You can always look at the 'topic' feed for any id in the system, and 
there are a few things that other specific types support:
/type/domain: schema, all
/type/type: schema, all
/type/user: created, watched, active, mydiscuss, admin, admintopics, 
adminall

These may change slightly with the next few releases.. but with your 
help we can figure out which ones are actually useful, and others that 
we also need. I'll document all of them once we figure out the ones that 
are here to stay.

So for example, the discussion feed for all domains and types that I 
(/user/alecf) administer is:
http://www.freebase.com/feed/discuss/admin/user/alecf

*Future
*We do hope to expose some kind of general "run an MQL query and hand it 
to me in RSS format" but we haven't quite figured out what that's going 
to look like yet. We're hoping that your feedback on these canned 
queries will help us brainstorm the generalized RSS service.

Enjoy!

Alec
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