LibraryThing adds 151,440 RSS/HTML feeds
LibraryThing has added 151,440 XML/RSS feeds, and an equal number of HTML versions of the feeds. Someone asked for "feeds for everything." This is pretty close.
LibraryThing now offers five types of feeds:
. To work with them you need some sort of feed reader, such as Bloglines. You can also plug them into your Google homepage and many other "start pages."
If you don't use a feed reader—I don't!—I've provided an HTML version for every RSS feed. I've given these links the icon
.
At present feeds are updated every twenty minutes. If usage is high I may need to cut that back a bit.
How you can help. I know bloggers love RSS feeds, so I'm asking for your help spreading the word. (Some people never signed up because of this issue!) And, as usual, I'd love help debugging and expanding the feature. Is there anything I'm missing?
Also, the HTML version is something of a hack; I'm having a deuce of a time getting PHP5's XSLT support to work. Charitable PHP hackers are invited to email and find out just how clueless I am about this sort of thing.
LibraryThing now offers five types of feeds:
- Recent books added by a member. Follow what a user is reading.
- Recent reviews by a member. Follow what a user is saying about books.
- Recent reviews of books a member owns. Find out what other people are saying about your books.
- Recent books tagged something. Follow new items for any tag in LibraryThing.
- Recent reviews of books tagged something. Follow reviews for any tag in LibraryThing.
. To work with them you need some sort of feed reader, such as Bloglines. You can also plug them into your Google homepage and many other "start pages."If you don't use a feed reader—I don't!—I've provided an HTML version for every RSS feed. I've given these links the icon
.At present feeds are updated every twenty minutes. If usage is high I may need to cut that back a bit.
How you can help. I know bloggers love RSS feeds, so I'm asking for your help spreading the word. (Some people never signed up because of this issue!) And, as usual, I'd love help debugging and expanding the feature. Is there anything I'm missing?
Also, the HTML version is something of a hack; I'm having a deuce of a time getting PHP5's XSLT support to work. Charitable PHP hackers are invited to email and find out just how clueless I am about this sort of thing.
posted by Tim at 4:11 AM
13 Comments:
I'd just like to say how impressed I am with the speed and usefulness of the new features that have been added to LibraryThing since I joined. Thanks.
I havn't checked out the RSS feeds yet, but I will.
Jessica
And now I'd like to apologise for my anonymous post above, but it really was me.
Jessica
Oh, okaaaay... I was trying to figure out how to find the feed for all of my books with a particular tag. Silly me; I need to read more carefully!
It'd be cool, though... in the mean time, I'll be content with the "recently reviewed" feed. =)
Happy New Year!
There seems to be a problem with hyphenated tags. When I go to my books tagged (for example) "literature-english", and click on "see tag info and related tags", there is nothing there.
What happened? Please don't tell me that I have to get rid of the hyphens like I did the parentheses!
Feeds, recommendations and blog widgets are really nice, but I would like more focus on the cataloging aspect rather than the social one: I appreciate more updates like the "Upload your own book covers" and the "Edit tags from within your catalog!" ones.
Thanks--this was another feature on my wishlist.
Wow! I was just logging on to leave a comment suggesting RSS feeds. You read my mind!
I don't love the fact that the feeds from individual members say "username's review" in every entry or that they collapse the review, date, & publication info into one field. But otherwise this is just what I was looking for. Thanks yet again, Tim.
I think adding a Yahoo RSS feed icon would make it very easy for people to add it to their standard home page.
http://publisher.yahoo.com/promote.php#addtomy
Like Travis, I at first misread and thought you were providing a feed per member per tag (instead of a feed per tag).
How hard would it be to set up a way to construct (on the fly as needed) a feed per member per tag?
"How hard would it be to set up a way to construct (on the fly as needed) a feed per member per tag?"
I would assume one could take the same data used to generate the "show all my books tagged x" pages and wrap it in the template used for these RSS feeds.
Probably the main reason not to at this point would be server load... but, one of the benefits could be the RSS feeds replacing the current catalog results pages. Using XSLT, you should be able to display the results as they presently look.
Thanks for the new feeds - much appreciated. If I could request one additional one? I'd like new books by author. I have a relatively small library but quite a few books by authors that don't seem well represented so far, and it'd be nice to be notified when other people add books by those folks. I imagine this could get tiresome for your servers if people demanded notification for every J K Rowling book that gets added, but I would have thought it'd only get used by people like myself wanting to keep an eye on the lesser known writers.
And thanks for the consistent updates to the site's features, whatever form they take!
I like having the HTML version. I found a little bug, though. On the page for http://www.librarything.com/rsshtml/reviews/szarka in place of the lines that should have publisher info and tags for Assasination Vacation there's just "Simon " after the br element. Taking a wild guess, maybe your XSLT is choking on the entity for the ampersand in "Simon & Schuster"?
Heads up! Here's the new standard for RSS feed icons...
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