dnalounge

bradfitz implemented RSS/RDF journals yesterday, so now my evil twin has a livejournal too: dnalounge. Nifty! Once there's a user interface to it, any site that provides an RSS/RDF feed will be able to be added to your friends list.

dnalounge is a feed of the What's New journal; there's another feed for the calendar overview, which is useful for Slashboxes. I don't think that kind of "calendar" feed really integrates with LiveJournal very well, though.

I remember when RSS was about to completely change the world: the web was going to work completely differently by the end of 1998 at the latest. It's nice to see that something useful is finally coming of it. The handful of sites out there like userland.com have all just seemed profoundly useless to me, but being able to dump sites I want to read daily into my LJ friends list is very cool. (Oh good lord, here's marca sucking guha's cock and comparing him to Gutenberg: TechVision Innovators! Shooooot meeeeee...)

One irritating thing about how it works today is that most sites seem to only provide titles in their feeds: for example, the slashdot feed only has the titles and URLs of the posts, not the front-page paragraph and its links; and memepool is even worse: that feed converts their news items to plain-text (all the links are gone) and truncates them to 90 characters or so.

Hopefully these feeds will improve now that the 800lb gorilla we know as LiveJournal is shuffling toward them...

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14 Responses:

  1. evan says:

    As I mentioned on <lj user="memepool">: back when we all first got excited about LiveJournal syndication, I mailed the memepool people asking them to put more information in their RSS feed and they shrugged me off. It annoyed me enough that I stopped reading the site, not that doing that was much of a loss for them.

    Brad stole some of my LiveJournals to do this syndication-- I know that at least <lj user=slashdot> was mine!

    • brad says:

      Bitch, please.... :P

      I thought you registered the LJ name one day after we talked about RSS syndication at Red Robin or something, in order to reserve it for future use.

      • jwz says:

        You know, instead of using s_ or _s or whatever in the names, you ought to just name them "slashdot.org" and so on. I assume users and communities can't contain periods, so now there's no conflict and no "what does `s' mean".

        And putting them under /rss instead of /users would be sensible too.

      • evan says:

        Yeah, basically... and then I gave up because the RSS feed was useless. Look at these headlines: "Are You A Friend of Gnome?"

        (Oh, and then I remembered that slashdot is worthless, too.)

        • jwz says:

          I don't find Slashdot worthless, but I rarely read the comments.

          I find the slashboxes very handy. LJ should have those.

    • pjammer says:

      Heh. Brad ganked <lj user=memepool> from me. Cheerfully surrendered - it's for a good cause. Even though the syndicated content forces you to go back to memepool for the links. I know Joshua Schacter (memepool admin) and he's really touchy about the whole thing. Whatever. :)

  2. nothings says:

    I imagine that any site with ads (e.g. slashdot) isn't going to be willing to give up their entire front page content to RSS. Also, maybe they want to count their hits or something.

  3. netik says:

    So, how do you add an RSS feed to livejournal?

  4. electricdog says:

    The <lj user="kuro5hin"> feed is pretty nifty though. I didn't realise this only started yesterday.

  5. nester says:

    when you said evil twin, it made me think of george stark from stephen king's "the dark half".

  6. jes5199 says:

    so... do we just advocate to Slashdot to make their blurbs available in RDF
    or does someone write a HTML to RDF slashdot stealer?