RSS Feed Search

[kellan_the_tabby]

Title:
RSS Feed Search

Area:
Feeds

Summary:
It'd be awful nice to have a way to _search_ for a feed, instead of scanning through the list (http://www.dreamwidth.org/syn/list.bml).

Description:
I know you can sort the feed by feed title, and that _does_ help, but there are still some that aren't named what you might expect, and it's a lot to slog through. A simple search box (okay, it might not be simple, I'm no programmer) would make finding feeds a lot easier.

Poll #2541 RSS Feed Search

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 51

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
44 (86.3%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
1 (2.0%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
0 (0.0%)

(I have no opinion)
6 (11.8%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[aedifica]

What do you have in mind? Do you want to search for one particular feed, or see if there are any feeds associated with the word "telephone"? If you're searching for one particular feed, you can put the feed URL in as though you were creating a feed and if the feed exists on DW already, you'll be asked if you want to subscribe.

[kyrielle]

But if you want to find a feed for your favorite site, you may not know what the feed address is. Or you may know they have multiple feeds (either for topics, or to support every flavor of RSS and atom) and not want to have to test every one of them or risk creating a duplicate. Being able to put either a keyword you think will appear in the title, or in the site's URL, would let you find all the feeds from the site.

I don't know if it would be useful enough, but I can see where just using the feed URL would be insufficient in some cases (I've encountered them before, and carried on wondering if I just created a duplicate feed or not).

[aedifica]

I could see that. I haven't been in any of those situations, which is why I asked what I did, but that makes sense to me.

[sally_maria]

Yes, like kyrielle I worry about creating duplicates. If you could search by lj/ij etc username or blog name, if would make life much simpler.

[pauamma]

Do you mean a search box like the one in http://www.dreamwidth.org/syn/, or do you have something else in mind?

[kellan_the_tabby]

Some of both, and it seems that a keyword search would solve (or at least assist in solving) both issues.

[kellan_the_tabby]

I was thinking of a keyword search -- the one you link to only searches for the entire feed URL, correct? As Kyrielle points out above, it's possible to create duplicates, and if you don't know what a feed address is or how to find it, that search box isn't useful at all.

[msilverstar]

+1

though it would be nice to have a way to search all feeds, which are public by default. This would be particularly good for new topics where I don't know which feeds might be good, for example RaceFail or 3D. I would be more interested in a feed chosen by a DW user than ye random site or twitter link.

[kellan_the_tabby]

Ooh, yes, I like this idea!

[feathertail]

This idea is win.

I think Dreamwidth should just plain make content more discoverable. It should be easy to find journals, feeds, and especially individual posts that pertain to a search query.

Dreamwidth is all about reading and writing, after all. It's just that it's easier right now to write on Dreamwidth than to find something to read (or to find someone to read what you write).

[holyschist]

I have not found this to work well for finding feeds. I recently unsubscribed from a feed, then changed my mind, and I could not find it again by entering the URL. I think this is also why there's a fairly high rate of feed duplications--DW doesn't seem to automatically recognize that two slightly different feed URLs are really for the same blog.

[denise]

Yeah, unless the URL is exactly the same, the system won't recognize it was the same feed. We have a few bugs open for making feed match fuzzier for that very reason.

[holyschist]

Is there a simple way to suggest consolidating feeds (are feed consolidable?)? Or a tag-wrangler type job that could be done, maybe by someone who's not much of a programmer yet?

[denise]

There is a way to do it, but we broke the console command with the friend split and haven't updated it yet. There's a bug open for it, but nobody's gotten around to fixing it yet!