Xanga Automatic RSS - wednesday 2003-01-08 1102 last modified 2006-01-29 0325
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Use Xanga? I don't. But if you do, you can now find an RSS feed for your journal at the URI:

http://ryanlee.org/feeds/xanga?user=username

where username is your Xanga identifier, i.e.

http://ryanlee.org/feeds/xanga?user=maboyden

will produce a feed for - margaret's thoughts -. You don't actually want to look at the feed (I think), you'd want to pass the URI along to a feed aggregator.

You might care if you feel like you have to check everybody's journal entry all the time just to see if they've added anything. I don't know if Xanga has other pay-for features to avoid wasting time like that, but if you use an aggregator like my Newswire service, you can just add everybody's feed to your viewing page and see at a glance when their last five journal entries were made. I'll probably write this up a little better later. There are other aggregators out there, you need not use mine; it's pretty wimpy at the moment. Search Google for some.

I'd appreciate it if you only touched that link through an aggregator. It generates a new feed everytime someone accesses it because Xanga has no method for describing if a page has changed lately. There are many technical reasons why I dislike Xanga -- though I should hold my tongue on that one since I don't publish any ETag's or Last-Modified's either. I'll probably make something more like /feeds/view-feed?feed_id= instead to start offloading the burden.

Xanga should really be doing this on its own. RSS feeds aren't very difficult to generate. Speaking of which, I should go generate one of my own...

Comments

Done. That to...

Done. That took maybe ten minutes. Come now, Xanga, it should be about that easy for you too... Mine offers a Last-Modified header, but I'll have to hack the server to perform conditional GET's.

Ryan Lee on January 08, 2003 01:08 PM

Never mind, I ...

Never mind, I didn't have to hack it, I just had to do the Last-Modified/If-Modified-Since processing within the feed generator instead of relying on the server. It also does If-Unmodified-Since, whoop-dee-doo.

Ryan Lee on January 08, 2003 01:59 PM

funny, i had nev...

funny, i had never noticed your paragraphs are justified (alignment-wise). but i guess there were so many short words in the first sentence of your journal entry that extra whitespace caught my eye. fascinating.

well, now you have fixed it. ok, i will re-create the effect by typing a reallylongrunonwordheresothatalltheshortwordspriorwillprobablybeonasingleline. hooray, i have succeeded!

Matt Libby on January 09, 2003 05:07 PM

Someone made t...

Someone made the same observation at work (it looked 'funky,' which meant good in my book, but not so in his), so I cheated this time and took the longer strings out of paragraphs. I have a thing for justified, well spaced text and subconsciously find most other presentations irritating (even if they occasionally end up with copious spacing, tis the price I pay). I'm (slowly) planning a presentational redesign, but I'm leaning towards keeping the justified text as a default.

Maybe I should introduce 'Troll' moderations, too...

Ryan Lee on January 10, 2003 04:43 AM

rss?

can you make it feed you the updated comments also? or am i just randomly blabbing along because i have no clue what rss is.

mac gngsta on January 11, 2003 12:05 AM

Good idea, I a...

Good idea, I added it in. The next journal entry in line explains what RSS is and how it gets used. Basically, I appended the number of comments to an individual blog entry's description.

Ryan Lee on January 11, 2003 08:53 AM

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