RSS Feeds
In case you’re using this blog’s feed to get updates about new features on BeerRiot, here’s a notice that BeerRiot now has its own feeds. 
I’m pretty green to the RSS scene, though, so if I’ve committed some terrible crime against RSS, please let me know, and I’ll get on fixing it. Or, if there’s just some way that I could improve the experience, which all of you RSS-fiends know about, those suggestions are most welcome.
Get the feed.
Nice! One of the places where I was hoping to see a feed link but didn’t is the personalized “Your Top Beers” page.
I realize that’s harder because it’s a personalized feed for each user, but I think there a couple ways to do it. You can make an authenticated feed, which requires users to enter their login credentials in their feed reader. That’s probably overkill for a custom list of beers.
The other, easier way is to include a secret hash for each user’s secret feed URL. Google uses this technique in most of its web apps. It’s a potential security hole, but it holds up reasonably well and might be worth the risk.
Finally, another benefit of including an identifying hash in the feed URL is that links in the feed can include that identifying hash as well, so you can put like, shrug, and dislike links for the user right in the feed!
Keep up the great work!
Interesting. I actually hadn’t considered using RSS for “Your Top Beers” because I was thinking of RSS as a chronological listing. I don’t really track when each beer changes rating for each person, so it didn’t seem to make much sense.
Is there precedent for using RSS in a non-chronological manner? It would be nice to see what benefits/pitfalls others have found in using it this way.
Thanks for the feedback.
Your RSS looks pretty good. Although:
http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi
gives a couple of warnings to URL
http://beerriot.com/rss/news.xml
Perhaps a small opportunity to fine tune things? Keep up the great site.
Hey - thanks for the link. I’ve been running the W3 validator over the rest of the site recently, but it doesn’t do anything but check the XML validity for RSS feeds.