It has been a little over seven days since our team launched Channel 9. I've had some instant message and email conversations with Customers and Microsoft employees on our use of RSS with Channel 9. I need to write some help on this for the site as I don't think its clear as to how deep you can go with RSS on our site. I'll start first with this weblog entry and eventually I'll move this post into a help file for the site.
Currently there are three levels of RSS support on Channel 9: Uber Level, Section Level and Thread Level. All is RSS 2.0 and the last time I checked it validates with the RSS Validator.
Uber Level
Selecting the XML icon to the right of FAQ in our global navigation provides an RSS feed. This one includes the top level threads for the entire Channel 9 site. If you want to follow everything this is the one you'll want to point your aggregator to.
Image showing the XML icon for the Channel 9 uber RSS feed
Section Level
If the Uber feed contains to much noise or if you want to break out your feeds by categories, then section level feeds might be more useful. The section feeds allow you to subscribe to just one section of Channel 9. An example would be if you only want to subscribe to the videos then use that section's RSS feed. It is located next to the title bar for that section (image below).
Our feeds do support RSS Enclosures as well so the videos should show up in your favorite aggregator. If your aggregator does not support enclosures we provide a link to the video as well.
Image showing the XML icon for the Channel 9 section level RSS feed
Thread Level
The final level of RSS Support is at the thread level. The idea behind this is instead of using email to track threads you are interested in we use RSS. You can subscribe/unsubscribe to a thread without using our system.
Its a pretty cool way of doing it and I use it all the time to keep tabs of what's happening in my threads. To subscribe to a thread select the orange XML icon to the right of the thread subject.
Image showing the XML icon for the Channel 9 thread level RSS feed
Continous improvement
We've made some tweaks to the feeds since launching, we added guid support and adjusted titles of the feeds. Unfortunately our enclosures just links to the streaming files, I'm working on getting it so that these link to the full download for the video.
We need to figure out the best way to link to the responses to a particular item. Some folks have suggested using the RSS Comments and others recommend Slashcomments. I'd really like some feedback on the best way to do this, what would you like to see. We are using a hybrid of forums and weblog software so I am not sure if it is appropriate to use the RSS Comments tag for the follow up posts.
Watch Channel 9 on your TV
You might have noticed a custom RSS Module in our feeds, this is for Newsgator Media Center Edition. Newsgator Media Center Edition uses RSS Enclosurers to bring Channel 9 to your television, its a pretty cool way to keep current on our site.
Some things we want to add
Soon we will add a watch list for you to track threads you find interesting on the site. With one click you can mark a thread as something you want to track. You'll be able to get quick links to your threads from your Channel 9 profile. We'll also give you an RSS link too for these, I'd like to allow users to expose there watch list as an RSS link to other users to. We also need to turn on RSS Support for the Channel 9 Wiki. FlexiWiki does not provide full content in its feed, so we need to add that in.
OPML Support
Once we fix other bugs and add features requested by our users I hope that we can add an OPML listed of Channel 9 users that enables people to track the webloggers and feeds submitted by Channel 9 users. We'll need to add an RSS element to people profiles, but I think this could be pretty cool.
It has been a lot of fun working on Channel 9, thank you for visiting the site and giving us your feedback. We're working hard to make it a fun place to be.
