Caveat Lector

So, yeah, DSpace RSS feeds. They don’t work like RSS feeds anywhere else in the universe.

The blog feeds I follow send me whatever’s been posted since the last time I polled them, when I poll them. No fixed number, just whatever’s there that I haven’t seen. This is the behavior I expect; I don’t want to miss posts just because it’s been a while since I polled, and one particular blog has gone on a posting spree for whatever reason.

DSpace RSS feeds give me the last five items. (I can change “five” to something else, so it’s really “the last n items,” but stick with me here.) It doesn’t matter if five, fifty, or five hundred items have been deposited since I last polled—I get the last five, no more.

This is not the behavior I want. I want to keep an eye on what’s going into the repository! That’s what the RSS feed is for, in my small beady repository-rat brain.

For once, I don’t think this is the DSpace developers’ fault; they’re relying on somebody else’s RSS library. Be nice if that library would fix itself, though. (And I could be wrong; I don’t know whether DSpace or the external library decides what goes into a feed at polling time.)

Edited to add: It’s my fault, as usual. RSS feeds are limited by number; all I can do about it is raise the number. Thanks to John Mark Ockerbloom, Aristotle Pagaltzis, and Jim Downing for setting me straight. (Though I still think the behavior is broken! Sometimes what one needs is a protocol, not a file format.)