Suggestions to the webmaster of loriweb.org

As a former student of the ILLC, I am very happy to see that the ILLC has launched a blog-based webportal for the research community of logic and rational interactions, called loriweb.org. Here is a snapshot:

The ILLC has finally made an attempt going from web1.0 to web2.0, which means more dynamics and interactions!

However, I noticed that there is an important element missing on loriweb’s front page. It is a link to the RSS feed. What is RSS?

RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it.

More details of RSS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)

Why RSS is important?

RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually. You ensure your privacy, by not needing to join each site’s email newsletter. The number of sites offering RSS feeds is growing rapidly and includes big names like Yahoo News.

Actually, since the loriweb is using the popular wordpress software (good choice!), it has an RSS feed by default: http://loriweb.org/?feed=rss2. So I subscribed to it using my Google RSS Reader. But then I found this problem. The loriweb RSS feed only outputs an abstract of the content. For example, here is a snapshot of the loriweb in my Google Reader:

You have to click on the article in order to read it fully.

And this is what you see from the blog of Terence Tao, a well-regarded mathematician:

In this case I can read all his articles without leaving the my reader. The difference is small if you only subscribe to a few blogs, but very noticeable when you
subscribe to dozens of blogs, which may have 1000+ new articles every week.

So my suggestions to the webmaster of loriweb.org are as follows:

• add a link to the RSS feed in the front page
• output the full text in the RSS feed.
  It is very easy to set in wordpress: login as admin, and find the Settings section, and choose the Reading subsection, then you can see the following:  just make sure Full text is chosen (this view is based on version 2.7.1)
  

Cheers, Ji

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