Have an RSS/Atom feed of the Reading List

[azurite]

Title:
Have an RSS/Atom feed of the Reading List

Area:
entries, rss

Summary:
Have an RSS/Atom feed of one's entire Reading List, including protected entries

Description:
I have yet to find a robust journaling site that has all the great features of friends and communities that also supports a singular RSS/Atom feed of the friends list/reading page. This would help users that want to view a "quick summary" of their reading page and only view the entries that are of interest to them at the moment, without necessarily looking at the whole list of full entries in a browser window.

Rather than having to friend a multitude of journals and communities in order to try and read entries (and not even protected ones, at that), have an RSS/Atom feed of one's entire friends' list, with a secure way for people to see protected entries in their reader of choice. (As an aside, using cookies supposedly doesn't work with most RSS readers, but NetNewsWire, the reader I use, does have an option for entering in a User ID and password and saving that in order to see protected entries.)

I have seen this done through convoluted hacks like styles and such on LiveJournal, but for me, it stopped working a little less than a month ago, with no explanation. If this kind of thing were officially supported, it would be wonderful!

Poll #740

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 46

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
32 (69.6%)

Should be implemented with changes.
8 (17.4%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
5 (10.9%)

(Other: please comment)
1 (2.2%)

Comments

[denise]

The reason that this was never added on LJ (aside from custom styles hackery) was because it would be, in essence, syndicating someone else's content. For instance, you can set your "synlevel", for the amount of content that appears in your own journal's RSS feed -- titles only, title + first paragraph, or full entry -- if you don't want your full entries to be syndicated, and by allowing someone to syndicate their reading page, it'd be possibly overriding someone else's choices there.

(I am completely 100% open to re-visiting this idea for DW, but wanted to provide context.)

[charmian]

Could this be done with keeping the existing synlevels? Although it would make the feature less useful, that would also preserve the choices.

[denise]

Sure, most things can be done eventually, given enough developer time. *g*

It'd actually be fairly simple, more or less. And I'm not bringing that up as a "this is why we will not do it" sort of rejection, just a "this is why I remember LJ never doing it" for people to think about. We do do a lot of things LJ always used to decide against, but I've honestly never thought one way or the other whether this should be one of them.

[charmian]

Oh yeah, I realize. IIRC, that hack that allowed you to do this was done w/ S1, so it isn't possible to do it on DW, right? If it preserves the existing syn levels, I don't really think it's anything but an automation of what currently using an OPML file to put all of your subscribed feeds into a feed reader does.

[denise]

You could technically do it in S2 as well if you created a S2 style that output valid RSS or ATOM, if there's a thing that lets you see your journal/reading page with an arbitrary s2id. (I am only vaguely ashamed to admit that I don't know if there is. S2 is Deep Voodoo.)

[aveleh]

tinyjo posted one a few years ago that's the one I always think of: http://community.livejournal.com/lj_nifty/119447.html

[azurite]

That's the one I've been using for a while that just recently died on me, and I can't figure out why. The folks behind my news reader said that it must be something on LJ's backend, and since I didn't change anything about the feed URL or the style that it pulls its data from, it must be something that LJ did that I can't "see."

[ciaan]

I would think you could do it in a way that allows you to scale down content but not up. So that if someone set their feed to full entry, you could pull either full entry or title only. But if they set it to title only, you couldn't pull full entry. And obvs it would have to not be showing locked stuff to other people who accessed the feed.

But I agree with melannen that to me (with my non-knowledge of coding) it sounds like part and parcel of the universal interoperability that I thought was being planned.

[(Anonymous)]

And this is exactly why I think this is a bad idea. At the very least, any implementation would have to respect the users choices on those issues. Allowing users to opt-out their journal from such access might be a good idea too.

[turlough]

+1

[azurite]

Ah, I didn't know that! LJ never seemed to make a statement about just why they only supported personal RSS feeds, not an aggregated one of the Friends' Page. What made no sense to me was that someone could achieve the same effect if they just subscribed to EVERY SINGLE FRIEND and community's RSS, but for folks with hundreds of friends and/or communities, that's not only tedious, it's difficult to stay organized.

I'm hoping it can be implemented keeping individual user's syndication choices in mind.

[foxfirefey]

Well, LJ does have OPML files to make that easier. Most feed readers accept those. I've updated and maintained that functionality for DW, too, so DW has OPML files as well. Here is yours:

http://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/opml.bml?user=azurite

It has some options, but isn't exactly user friendly yet. I should make a more user friendly how-to page instead of forwarding someone directly to their OPML file if logged in.

[azurite]

Hm, didn't work for me, even when I added my username and password to the info box in NetNewsWire. Of course, I'm open-minded for other feed aggregators for the Mac, if anyone knows of some good (free?) ones. I've tried a bunch, and NNW was just the one that worked best for me for the longest period.

[foxfirefey]

Hrm, what do you mean didn't work?

[azurite]

When I add it to NetNewsWire, it can't pull any information from the feed. Normally, the URL changes to the "title" of the feed and then I can see all the articles in the feed, but not so with this link. This is what happened to my LiveJournal S2 style (the [Bad username or site: tinyjo @ livejournal.com"] one) a few weeks ago: it was working, and then it just stopped updating. When I re-added it, I couldn't even get it to register the feed as valid with content.

When I run it through NNW's feed validation (which goes to feedvalidator.org; not sure how good that is), it reports bacL "This feed does not validate. line 6, column 0: Unexpected xmlURL attribute on outline element."

[azurite]

Oops, I meant tinyjo.

I'm betting that people being able to edit their own comments is something that will be for Paid Account users, like it is on LJ?

[foxfirefey]

Yeah--you can see which are the paid account features and why here.

[foxfirefey]

It kind of sounds like you're giving the OPML to it as a feed instead of importing it? OPML isn't a feed itself, it's a collection of feeds that most readers can import and export. If you want the auth=digest version of the OPML file, use this one--it might work to have an authenticated version of the feed that will give you protected entries you have access to.

I think NNW should be able to import OPML--maybe look around in the menus or something?

[azurite]

I just copied and pasted the link you gave me into NNW, so if that wasn't the right way to go about that, that's probably why it didn't work. :} I did try to Import it (because NNW does support Import/Export of OPML files), but it wants to find an actual FILE, rather than "import from URL." Do I just save the "file" at the link(s) you gave me and try to use that?

[azurite]

Okay, I went to the most recent link you supplied and saved it as an *.opml file. NNW recognized it and asked for my User ID and password, which I supplied, but when I imported, I got a folder of feeds, only one of which (Dreamwidth Beta Testing) actually got any items/articles! It at least got the titles (rather than just the feed URLs) of the other ones, though. Maybe that's because some of them don't have content from within the past 14 days? I know that's not true of all of them, too.

[pauamma]

It looks like LJ did revisit the idea:

http://changelog.livejournal.com/11009393.html
http://changelog.livejournal.com/11045018.html

[charmian]

Agreed, this would be immensely useful. Posterous has this, and I like it a lot.

[aveleh]

My preferred implementation includes: (put it on the www. domain and) only let users see it when they're logged in. It prevents all those complaints about easily republishing someone else's work (granted, it's still easy to do with S2 hackery, but it makes it so that this particular implementation can't be misused), and makes it more clear that it's *not* your own content.

[msilverstar]

+1

[melannen]

... I kind of assumed something like this would be happening as a sister project to "syndicate your entire friendlist from other services onto DW". If you're going to make it easy to syndicate the lj reading list here, it only seems fair to make it easy for me to syndicate this reading list elsewhere.

I would, yeah, want to make it so the option only shows up for your own flist, though of course there would still be the possibility of other people picking it up once the syn feed is out there. And preserve existing synlevel settings, yes.

[turlough]

I didn't even think of it that way but it does make sense. I think I need to change my vote.

[mark]

FWIW, I am very against this idea. I don't want my content showing up in someone else's feed.

And as soon as you allow people to opt out, the feed becomes nearly useless. The person reading the feed still has to click back to Dreamwidth, so they might as well just start there to begin with.

(This isn't to say it won't get implemented, I'm just providing my particular feedback on it.)

[azurite]

I guess it depends on the type of content. When I post here or to LJ, the security settings I choose alter who can read it. So if I say "I don't want my protected entries showing up in feeds," then someone who subscribes to my LJ/DW won't see them, even if they're "logged in." Alternatively, I could have special filters so that only entries of X type go into the feed, nothing else. That way, I know exactly what content can and does go into feeds.

I'm also thinking of communities and other journals where people aren't concerned about the content being circulated as RSS. The whole point of RSS is to let people know when something's been updated, and I've found it a LOT easier than reading a whole huge Reading/Friends Page. The RSS puts everything into tidy summaries with names and dates, rather than whole entries, 20 (or so) at a time. That way, I can only read what I want, when I want.

[thorfinn]

Hrm. I don't really see a difference between an authenticated RSS feed and an authenticated webpage. If the viewer is authenticated, then there is no difference.

Yes, there's an aspect where an RSS feed is more convenient and less obviously authenticated/secure, but in these days of web browser password saving and similar things, there's very little practical difference.

There's little to no point having an RSS feed of my own journal - I want to read other people's.

[squirrelitude]

All I really care about is finding out that someone has posted, and roughly what it is about. I'd be happy to have your posts show up as titles with a link in the body, and other folks' posts show up in full.