> That would work rather well for pages like [[todo]] and [[bugs]], where
> you want to know about any updates, not just initial
> creation. --[[JoshTriplett]]
+
+ > Of course you can use email subscriptions for that too.. --[[Joey]]
+
+ >> I have more thoughts on this topic which I will probably write
+ >> tomorrow. If you thought my other patches were blue-sky, wait until
+ >> you see this. --Ethan
+
+OK, so here's how I see the RecentChanges thing. I write blog posts and
+the inline plugin generates RSS feeds. Readers of RSS feeds are notified
+of new entries but not changes to old entries. I think it's rude to change
+something without telling your readers, so I'd like to address this.
+To tell the user that there have been changes, we can tell the user which
+page has been changed, the new text, the RCS comment relating to
+the change, and a diff of the actual changes. The new text probably isn't
+too useful (I have a very hard time rereading things for differences),
+so any modifications to inline to re-inline pages probably won't help,
+even if it were feasible (which I don't think it is). So instead we
+turn to creating diffs automatically and (maybe) inlining them.
+
+I suggest that for every commit, a diff is created automagically
+but not committed to the RCS. The page containing this diff would be
+a "virtual page", which cannot be edited and is not committed.
+(Committing here would be bad, because then it would create a new
+commit, which would need a new diff, which would need to be committed,
+etc.) Virtual pages would "expire" and be deleted if they were not
+depended on in some way.
+
+Let's say these pages are created in edits/commit_%d.mdwn. RecentChanges
+would then be a page which did nothing but inline the last 50 `edits/*`.
+This would give static generation and RSS/Atom feeds. The inline
+plugin could be optionally altered to inline pages from `edits/*`
+that match any pages in its pagespec, and through this we could get
+a recent-changes+pagespec thing. You could also exclude edits that have
+"minor" in the commit message (or some other thing that marks them as
+unremarkable).
+
+You could make an argument that I care way too much about what amounts
+to edits anyhow, but like Josh says, there are use cases for this.
+While this could be done with mail subscriptions, I can think of sites
+where you might want to disable all auth so that people can't edit
+your pages. --Ethan
+
+> I really dislike all Wiki engine recentchanges pages. They all tend to be
+> fairly machine readable, but confusing for non-wiki users to grok. And I've
+> yet to see an _attractive_ recentchanges implementation. IkiWikis' is no
+> better or worse than the others.
+>
+> I really like the frontpage of [Bill
+> Seitz](http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/FrontPage) as an recentchanges
+> format. Note how he uses some clever css to show changes in different
+> sections of the website. I modeled my own
+> [recentchanges](http://xtermin.us/recentchanges) page page on his ideas. This
+> probably isn't appropriate for non-WikiLog style setups, but is this
+> something closer to what you what was requested?
+>
+> BTW: My recentchanges plugin does not seem to add a lot processing time
+> to compiling. Then again, I'm not pulling changelog message from the RCS
+> backend.
+>
+> -- CharlesMauch