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Create your own RSS feeds: The chemistry of users, posts, comments and tags

Submitted by Zhigang Suo on

Say you have learned how to subscribe to RSS feeds using a feed reader, or an email account. You are ready to create your own RSS feeds.

A post is like an atom, and a feed a molecule. You can be a chemist to create your own molecules by discovering ways to form feeds. Here is the basic chemistry of posts.

Atoms

  • User number. Each user has a user number. You can find the number of a user by clicking his name or photo anywhere on iMechanica. You can also search for a user. For example, when you click a photo of John Hutchinson, you will be on this page, user/452. The number in the URL, 452, is the user number of Hutchinson.
  • Node number. Each post has a node number. You can find the node number of a post by clicking the title of the post, and looking at the URL of the post. For example, the post, node/474, has the node number 474.
  • Tag number. Each tag has a tag number. You can find the number for a particular tag by clicking the tag. For example, the tag "Research" is a channel featured in the header of iMechanica. Clicking "Research", you will see the URL, taxonomy/term/76. The tag number is 76.

Rules of chemistry

  • All blog posts. blog/feed
  • Blog entries of a user. e.g., the feed for the blog entries of Hutchinson (user number 452) is blog/452/feed.
  • Comments on a post. e.g., for comments on node 474, the feed is crss/node/474
  • Posts with the same tag. e.g., for all posts in the Research Channel (tag 76), the feed is taxonomy/term/76/0/feed
  • Comments on all posts with the same tag. e.g., for all comments on posts in the research Channel (tag 76), the feed is crss/term/76.
  • Posts with at least one tag in a set of tags. For example, the feed taxonomy/term/357+445/0/feed gives you feeds of posts of both the Computational Mechanics Forum (357), and Technology Corner (445).
  • Posts with a set of common tags. For example, the feed taxonomy/term/527,528,529/0/feed gives you all posts of a course I taught, with tags ES 241 (Tag number 527), Advanced Elasticity (Tag number 528), and Spring 2007 (Tag number 529).

Tag numbers for channels featured in the header of iMechanica

  • Research 76,
  • education 128,
  • mechanician 75,
  • opinion 77,
  • industry 118,
  • conference 74,
  • job 73,
  • video 437.

Tag numbers for forums

  • Ask iMechanica 109,
  • Biomechanics Forum 362,
  • Computational Mechanics Forum 357,
  • Contact Mechanics Forum 596,
  • Experimental Mechanics Forum 361,
  • Fracture Mechanics Forum 666
  • Fluid Mechanics Forum 440,
  • Integrated Structures Forum 363,
  • Materials Forum 390,
  • Mechanics Course Forum 374.

Acknowledgments

I thank Michael H. Suo for showing me how comment RSS feeds work.

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Zhigang Suo

Dear Henry: I cannot find this button in Drupal. It should be a simple thing to do, but I don't know how.

However, I added a feed called "More comments" on the right side of iMechanica, using a module found by Michale Suo. It looks like an ugly hack, and we'll fix it when we have a better solution.

In general, a more effective way to track comments is to set up your own RSS feed reader. It takes 2 minutes to set up, and it is free.  In particular, if you use Google Reader, you can track many, many comments, as well as all posts.

Fri, 03/30/2007 - 20:04 Permalink