Dreamwidth Suggestions

Description:
Here is something I sometimes do: I pick an interest on my interests list, click to see who shares that interest, then look at the individuals' journals to see if maybe I'd like to subscribe to that journal. Thing is, it can get a bit tedius clicking on all those links. Many have no public entries, so it turns out there's nothing to see at all. There's got to be a better way...

That better way, I think, would be a page for each interest that works like a "reading" page for that interest, displayed in the user's reading page style. It would show, in reverse chronological order, the public entries of people who have that interest.

A link to an interest's reading page (IRP) could be placed on the page you see now when searching for or clicking on an interest. There are already a few links there with simple explanations, above the list of accounts with that interest; add the IRP link there. Nothing needs to go away.

IRPs should respect users' privacy selections and avoid inadvertantly exposing anything that a user might not want exposed. To simplify this suggestion (!) I'll just say it should work like the "Latest Things" page does, with the really cool five minute delay thing etc. (So an IRP is a little like an interest-specific Latest Things.)

Possible problem: Journals that post large numbers of entries in relatively short periods of time could overwhelm the IRPs of all their interests. Based on Latest Things I'm guessing there aren't journals like that, but if there are, their entries should probably be excluded from IRPs.

Another possible problem: Depending on the database structure, generating IRPs might be a lot of work for the server. If that's the case... maybe generate on first request, cache, and use the cached version for a while (an hour? more or less depending on load?) instead of creating it fresh every time.