External Feed Module

[kirby1024]

Title:
External Feed Module

Area:
modules, rss

Summary:
A module whose purpose is to generate a list of links from an External feed, to be displayed on a sidebar

Description:
A simple module: The user, during customization, specifies a feed URL. The module then parses this feed, collects titles and links, and produces a short list of items from that feed, for readers of the person's DW to follow through to. The list would probably just be the titles of the items in the feed, hyperlinked to the linked page. I'm envisioning something that would allow you to show feeds from various bookmarking or link sharing sites, like del.icio.us, Google Reader, Facebook, etc, but in theory such a system could also be used to add, say, Twitter feeds as well. In short, it's a way of allowing users to provide notification of their other presences, or to niftily share links with others.

Some drawbacks and issues: Reading external feeds could be bandwith intensive, especially if lots of users begin utilising this option, and depending on how the module is designed. On the other end, if the module is built as a just-in-time system (ie, it reads the feed when someone loads the page) there could be issues with load time, and concerns about popular pages hammering the feed's originating server. Some ways to combat these could include a caching system.

An alternative could be to piggy-back onto the existing syndication system - Instead of using an external URL, the user can instead create a syndicated account, and then direct the module to load items from the syndicated account, which significantly reduces bandwith issues, but could suffer from being CPU-intensive, depending on the way it's coded.

Poll #1211 External Feed Module

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 31

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
15 (48.4%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
1 (3.2%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
2 (6.5%)

(I have no opinion)
13 (41.9%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[liv]

If this can be implemented reasonably, it would be really, really useful. I would love to put my Twitter feed in a sidebar module, so that people could either look at it or ignore it. I do see potential security problems, though; what happens if someone adds a feed for a really dodgy site?

[zvi]

Er, what does dodgy mean in this context? Someone can link directly to any other site on the internet now, so I'm not sure what additional dodginess would be introduced, if this were pretty strictly link harvesting.

[aedifica]

How many people would really see something like that, though? When I'm reading someone's Dreamwidth, I'm reading it on my own reading page, not on their journal page. I only click over to their journal at all to leave a comment. I know there are some people who read it straight on the poster's own journal page, but are there many people who do?

[zvi]

It wouldn't necessarily be for visitors, though. I could add a module for my delicious network, for instance, and it would be dead useful for me.

[turlough]

Ooh, Delicious, I didn't even think of that! *changes vote*

[aedifica]

Oh, that makes a lot more sense than what I was envisioning!

[melannen]

This would work with LibraryThing! I could have an LT widget finally! Yay! (...if LT's rss feeds are working.)

[sky]

I would love to have this so, so much. I'm always sad that I can't use Twitter and Delicious's existing official widgets on my DW (or LJ for that matter).

[raveninthewind]

I like this suggestion. I've been pondering what to do with my current daily Loudtwitter feed to LJ. If I want the post on DW, I have to copy it over to DW, then delete the first loudtwitter post on LJ (because I crosspost from DW).

The content of my tweets is not the same as my journal posts, so I like the idea of having them on my journal somewhere. I don't necessarily need them as posts, so this suggestion would work.