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Loading ...Will, this is great.
You’ve just destroyed my productivity for the night.
Now you just need to get cricinfo to change so that when it links to a blog post on the front page, it actually links to the post, not the blog 
New RSS feeds from Cricinfo
By Will 2 years ago, mid-December Add your comment below
Update December 30 2008. Now live.
I’ve been rebuilding Cricinfo’s RSS feeds over the past couple of weeks. Or rather, advising our geniuses to do it. So here’s a sneak preview.
You can get a feed from any player (55,000 and counting), country, team, series, match or ground on our site. Whenever news is posted to it, you’ll be notified. It’s not yet visible on the site, but should be done in time for Christmas. In the meantime, here’s the feed for the ongoing India-England series:
http://content-www.cricinfo.com/rss/content/feeds/news/361035.xml
The number in bold is the key. You can change it to match any player/country/team/series you like, then subscribe to the feed. Andrew Flintoff’s player page is at http://content-www.cricinfo.com/indveng/content/player/12856.html so his feed would be http://content-www.cricinfo.com/rss/content/feeds/news/12856.xml
It’s an important step for Cricinfo to become a little bit more open and give people more flexibility in how they read. Anyway. Hope you find it useful. In the meantime it also gives you the chance to make your own and smash together various different feeds into one big one. Here’s one I did for all the counties.
5 Responses to “New RSS feeds from Cricinfo”
December 13th, 2008 at 2.44 am
December 13th, 2008 at 10.48 am
The one you give for the test didn’t work, but I found this one which did work:
http://content-www.cricinfo.com/rss/content/feeds/news/361050.xml
BTW, nice batting by Strauss. Looks like Man of the Match will be an easy choice if England wins.
December 13th, 2008 at 7.47 pm
Gonzo, there is a reason for that. We link to the homepage of each blog instead of the post in order to encourage people to scroll down. The actual post in question may not entertain them long enough to read it, whereas others lower down might poke their curiosity. We do, however, link to specific posts in headline clusters, particularly on match-days or during Surfer roundups.
December 14th, 2008 at 5.15 pm
I assumed it was deliberate, but it’s really frustrating in two main scenarios.
a) You’re on a mobile device on a slow connection, and it’s really irritating to add this extra step.
b) The blog has since published more entries, and so you click on a link about topic X, but are taken to a blog with stories about Y and Z at the top, before you scroll down and find the story about X.
It comes across as deceptive behavior to generate clicks and views, even though I don’t think that’s the case.
I think you fulfill the same aim as you’ve stated by simply having blog layouts that list other stories in the same blog alongside the article, and you’re not treating your viewers poorly that way.
The fact that your blog story linking behavior is inconsistent only makes the situation worse, not better
December 31st, 2008 at 1.46 pm
Super, that’ll help clean up my feeds somewhat.
If you want to make the geek side of cricinfo better, how about an xml interface to statsguru?
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