[Design] RSS in Cosmo for event change notification

[Mimi Yin]

It might also be nice if Chandler items could display when they've  
been edited and by whom. So I can go to a list view of the Office  
calendar and see all the recently added/edited items at the top, like  
new, unread email.

On Apr 10, 2006, at 3:43 PM, Mitchell Kapor wrote:

> I propose we seriously look into developing a notification  
> capability in Cosmo 0.4.  The main use case to be supported is  
> notification of recent event changes via an RSS feed of a calendar  
> published on Cosmo.
>
> This is of particular use when a calendar has a reader who is NOT  
> the writer of events, e.g., Esther keeps my calendar and adds  
> appointments to it.  As it now stands, if I want to be sure whether  
> an appointment has been finalized I either have to look through  
> future weeks or ask Esther.  Neither of these methods are very  
> efficient.  It would be easier if I simply received a notification  
> that my calendar had changed.  Then I would know for sure.
>
> Cosmo already has RSS support in 0.3.  The trick now is to make it  
> useful with the least amount of work.  What is of interest are  
> recent changes to the calendar.  It doesn't matter what the date of  
> an event is, per se, but that it has been changed, i.e., added,  
> deleted, or modified.
>
> If Cosmo is able to keep track via a timestamp of event changes,  
> that would be the basis of the feed.  In the simplest possible  
> useful implementation (which is where I think we should start),  
> Cosmo would maintain an RSS feed of, say, the last 7 days of changes.
>
> My expectation is that this would be good enough to make it  
> worthwhile to use any RSS reader to subscribe to this feed.  New  
> changes would show up as unread items.  It's as simple as that.
>
> One virtue of this approach is that it allows us to add useful  
> functionality to the overall Chandler system at a rate more like  
> the speed of web development and less like the usual rate of  
> Chandler client development itself (which is slow because it's the  
> nature of the beast).
>
> Extended functionality:  The RSS reader is Chandler could be  
> brought to a point of usefulness that it could be used rather than  
> an external RSS readers.  This would be nice, but it is not  
> necessary.  Or could happen later.
>
> There could be user control of the number of days of recent changes  
> to be kept in the feed.  Again, nice but not necessary.
>
> Another nice-to-have would be the ability to click on a link in the  
> body of the feed item and be taken to the detail view of that event  
> in Chandler (or Scooby).
>
> Question:
>
> Is it easy to develop a feed that somehow distinguishes between  
> additions, modifications, and deletions?
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