Group Feeds

From Mugshot Developer Wiki

Define

Provide passive link activity for groups around common interests.

This activity came from a broader discussion.

Research

The main options for feed parsing seem to be the Jakarta Feedparser and Rome. Jakarta Feedparser seems to be a bit of a dead project right now (the main developer got frustated with the ASF procedures and released a fork). One advantage of the Feedparser is the FeedLocater class, which automatically locates a feed given a web page URL. Replicating that functionality shouldn't be hard, but could take some time.

We found that many of the groups inside mugshot are topic or region based. The most active groups are centered around a certain topic like Linux or Cute Cats. To encourage activity around a topic we are going to try adding feed support to groups where new feeds would passively be pushed into a group by the system.

Ideate

• Personal Feeds — Being able to subscribe yourself to feeds
• Group Feeds — Subscribing a whole group to a feed to explore links together
• Auto grabbing feed links similar to Google Desktop and offering them some how

Prototype

Here are some sketches of various pieces that will need to be built.

What a bubble from a group feed would contain	Different buttons / icons to use during setting up a feed	Use the group account page for setting up group feeds
List the groups feeds on the group page
Mockup of Group Account Page	Mockup of Group Account Page with Finding Feeds dialog	Mockup of Group Account Page with Finding Feeds Error dialog

Icons needed

Implement

The implementation here was straightforward; we used Rome to parse the feeds, and the TagSoup library for scraping feeds out of sites and for converting feed entry titles/descriptions from HTML to plain text. The trickiest bit was the Ajax fun on the /group-account page for adding feeds.

Learn

Learn is the current phase in this activity's design process

It's live on the site, we'll see how it goes.