Customizing Mininova RSS Feeds

Mininova offers search-based feeds i.e. RSS feeds that can be generated according to some optional parameters.

Mininova has two basic feed URLS; one is the global RSS feed at http://mininova.org/rss.xml. The second is the RSS feed for a search, found at http://mininova.org/rss/search+terms. Incidentally, I'm a big fan of their 'clean' URLs; very easy to use and very intuitive.

Starting with the global feed, parameters that can be passed are:

• cat : The category of the torrent. For example, 'Movies' are category 4.
• sub : The sub-category. For example, 'Action' movies are sub-category 1 while 'Animation' movies are 29. The sub-categories aren't necessarily in sequential order. Sub-category 2 is 'Trance/ House/ Dance' under the 'Music' category.
• user : The user name. For example, 'aXXo'. Case-insensitive, so you could use 'axxo' or 'AXXO'.
• num : The number of results you want returned. The default count is 20 items.
• direct : This is a new addition and doesn't take a value. It replaces the link of the feed item with the actual download URL ( you know, the one you see stating 'Download this torrent!' ) so that when you click on it, the download starts instead of you being taken to the 'General Information' page of the torrent.

You can't really combine these parameters, but if you attempt to

• cat takes precedence over the others
• user is ignored if either cat or sub is used
• direct can be used with any of the others, either as the first parameter ( ?direct ) or at the end ( ?cat=1&direct )

The search feed is much less customizable but you can easily find the button for the feed at the top of the search page, if you're not comfortable fiddling with the URLs.

• Spaces are replaced by +'s
• You can filter a category by simply adding the category number at the end of the URL like http://mininova.org/rss/search+terms/2
• Sub-categories don't seem to work, I was getting weird results with URLs like http://mininova.org/rss/search+terms?sub=35 or http://mininova.org/rss/search+terms?cat=35

Well, that's all there is to it. Have fun. And if you find something else, lemme know!