bioneural.net

Rob over at Electrolund.com installed the Sage plugin for Firefox, featuring auto-discovery of all feeds associated with a given page. In so doing he discovered that bioneural.net offered a handful of feeds all called "bioneural.net". Not at all helpful! Were they duplicates? Were they different feed formats (flavours of RSS or Atom)? If they were unique, how could you tell them apart without studying the feed content? Valid questions I wanted to find answers for. I came up with a partial solution for more meaningful titles to help distinguish one feed from another.

Before

If you click on the "Discover Feeds" icon in the Sage window (v 1.3.8), in the dialog that opens there is a control in the top right corner. Click this and enable the display of "URL"; you'll need to drag the column dividers to see the URL because the dialog isn't resizable (not-so-good). On my home page 16 feeds were discovered, these being:

• 14 category feeds;
• 1 comment feed;
• 1 external feed (FeedBurner, which I hard-coded in the head element).

Although the comments feed was helpfully called "Comments for bioneural.net", all the rest had a title of just "bioneural.net". On a single page, Sage auto-discovered the post's comment feed, the external (main) FeedBurner feed, and the feed for each UTW tag. Again only the comment feed had a meaningful title (e.g. "Comments on: IOTW: Pohutukawa").

After

I first tried this patch to edit wp-feed.php (WordPress v 2.0.5) and allow a custom version of wp-commentsrss2.php and wp-rss2.php to reside in my theme directory. Unfortunately I couldn't resolve a parse error.

To help distinguish the type of comment ("conversation") feed (all vs.per topic) I thus made a small edit to wp-commentsrss2.php, from:

<title><?php if (is_single() || is_page() ) { printf(__('Comments on: %s'), get_the_title_rss()); } else { printf(__('Comments for %s'), get_bloginfo_rss("name")); } ?></title>

to:

<title><?php if (is_single() || is_page() ) { printf(__('Conversation re: %s (on bioneural.net)'), get_the_title_rss()); } else { printf(__('All conversation on %s'), get_bloginfo_rss("name")); } ?></title>

As for wp-rss2.php I searched the Codex for a template tag that would insert dynamic data into the feed (all the bloginfo_rss tags are static). The solution I found makes use of wp_title. In wp-rss2.php I changed:

<title><?php bloginfo_rss('name'); ?></title>

to:

<title><?php wp_title(' '); ?><?php if(wp_title(' ', false)) { echo ' on'; } ?> <?php bloginfo_rss('name'); ?></title>

With this edit the main feed (http://www.bioneural.net/feed/) shows the title "bioneural.net", but category feeds now specify the category. For example, the Mac category (http://www.bioneural.net/category/mac/feed/) shows the title "Mac on bioneural.net". I say this is a partial solution because UTW tag feeds, such as for osx (http://www.bioneural.net/index.php?tag=osx&feed=rss2) still show the generic title "bioneural.net". This only affects single pages, and won't of course be an issue at all if you don't use UTW. The feeds remain valid.

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