Peter Stuifzand

Rivers and massive blogposts

I build a program called Pompiedom. I host a test river about Perl. It shows feeds from all sources in one page. Just like (rss) planets.

One of the problems is that there are a lot of different types of feeds. There is no default way that people create feeds and no feed has the same kind of content. I think this is a good thing.

The problem I have currently is that some feeds contain massive blog posts. These massive are really nice to read and they are really hard to show well. Especially when mixed with short and small link blog posts.

My current solution to this problem is to set the description of the post to the title of the post. If it has one.

This has two effects.

  1. Posts with the same title and description, get only one of them. Just the title.
  2. Posts with huge bodies get a short and small body.

This is nice for a link blog type river, but not very nice for a general purpose feed reader.

© 2023 Peter Stuifzand