jlaine.net

New on dotherightthing.com: Atom feeds

Posted by # February 13th 03:58 PM

We just went live with a three week tuneup at dotherightthing.com. The main update is the introduction of a wide variety of Atom feeds. I just wrote an in-depth article about all the different feeds available on the dotherighthing.com blog but let me get a bit more geeky here.

We’re using Ruby on Rails and the Simply Restful stuff in it so adding an Atom representation for a resource like entry, company or user is dead simple: just add a new response type with respond_to:

  respond_to do |type|
    type.html do
      # normal stuff
    end
    type.atom do
      # render the atom feed
    end
  end

Now, when someone requests the action with type atom (e.g. http://dotherightthing.com/companies/starbucks.atom), the code inside type.atom will be executed. However, the niceties don’t stop there. The new resource_feeder plugin makes everything even easier. We don’t need to setup a specific template for the feeds at all, all we have to do is to specify some options that don’t match the standard and then call render_atom_feed_for:

  feed_options = { :feed => 
                      {:title => "dotherightthing.com #{params[:sort]} entries",
                       :link => entries_url(:sort => params[:sort])},
                   :item => {:description => :body_html},
                   :class => Entry }

                   ...

  type.atom do
    render_atom_feed_for(@entries, feed_options)
  end

And that’s it!

Another great thing about Simply Restful is that all the url’s are extremely logical. A user profile can be viewed at http://dotherightthing.com/users/jarkko, a feed for his content is at http://dotherightthing.com/users/jarkko.atom. The same is true for companies: http://dotherightthing.com/companies/apple → http://dotherightthing.com/companies/apple.atom.

Gotta love the RESTful features in Rails!

Don’t forget to check out the variety of feeds we offer at dotherightthing.com.