I’m not going to patronise you by explaining to you what RSS feeds are. If you’re reading the development blog of a “Web 2.0″ kind of web site, I reckon there’s a fair chance that you’re down with the whole syndication thing.

So I’ll just use this post to tell you a bit about the implementation of RSS on EdinburghMenus.com and a couple of neat little things about them that you might not have noticed…

Our basic RSS feed contains the most recent reviews written on the site. There is also a custom feed for every business showing the most recent reviews written about that business. And finally, every registered user has their own RSS feed showing the most recent reviews written by them. You can grab these customised feeds from the listing page for any business or the profile page of any user.

Now something you might not have noticed — our RSS feeds contain embedded geographical data about the business. This means that not only can you view the RSS feeds in your newsreader, or whatever, as normal, you can also do clever stuff with the coordinates in the feed to display the reviews on a map. To quickly and easily see this in action, look what happens when you just paste the entire URI of a feed into a Google Maps search.

If there are any other feeds you’d like us to make available (perhaps newest businesses on the site or the current highest rated businesses), just let us know — EdinburghMenus.com is constantly in development and we’ll happily implement new features that our users will find useful.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 16th, 2007 and is filed under development, new features.
If you want, you can reply.