How have I gotten almost 13 hours into the Blogathon without posting about WordPress?

Oh yeah, I was saving posts like these for the harder times. [Yes, the sound you just heard was me beginning to grasp at straws.]

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about user-specific RSS feeds for WordPress. With user registration now being a viable part of the WordPress system—because users != weblog authors—-I think that we have the capacity to improve users’ experience with WordPress.

I think that a user should be able to decide what all categories of feeds they want to see. For example, if a user of IJSM didn’t want to see all my Blogathon 2005 blather—and frankly, I’m not sure that I blame them—they could vote to not see all those posts.

Of course, that’s a complex process, because you really have two options to present to the user:

1. Do not present items marked only in this category.
2. Do not present any items marked with this category.

Many of my posts today have had multiple categories. Everything’s been in Blogathon 2005, but I’ve touched on a number of other subjects that people might be, presumably, interested in seeing.

With any number of posts, there’s going to be overlap between categories. There will, in these cases, be overlapping areas if you marked these up with a Venn diagram. [If you think this entire post is an excuse for me to say something about Venn diagrams, well ... you're almost right. I do take this suggestion seriously.]

Some folks will want to block out everything. An example not related to the Blogathon? Perhaps someone doesn’t want to hear a word I have to say about politics or religion. [Fair enough!] They’d want exclusive bans anytime I posted on that subject. But they might not want an exclusive ban on any posts categorized as geekery. I mean, maybe they’re not into the geeky things I talk about, but sometimes, I add geekery in for an extra bit of fun. [Fun for me, that is!]

I’ll explore implementations of aggregation of user-specific RSS feeds later on …