Wrong question?

[ffutures]

Maybe I'm asking the wrong question re. RSS feeds. Is there any other easy way to set one up without using Livejournal? E.g. a program that creates a file or something which I put on one of my web sites that does an RSS feed to both of my sites and anyone else wanting it?

Comments

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

That depends a bit on what you consider "easy". I do it on my site with a bit of Perl (~40 lines or so). Which I considered trivial, but then I've been doing Perl since 1991.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I was thinking more in terms of something like a blogging tool.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Blosxom -- what I use for my main blog -- automatically provides an RSS version of the site instead of the regular HTML version if you just point your RSS reader/browser at it with the right parameter.

RSS is simply a cut-down XML version of the site with information describing the URLs needed to see the stories, and a date stamp for when they were posted.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

So does livejournal, but it doesn't seem to be possible to do a text-only RSS feed from a free account, and I'm not going to pay for another account just for the feed.

[pmcray.livejournal.com]

What I'd like to be able to do is pipe my TypePad Atomic Razor blog postings directly into my LiveJournal account rather than having to do this to a separate feed (atomicrazorfeed and tanakambafeed). Given that Six Apart now own both TypePad and LiveJournal, one can hope that they might eventually get round to looking at ways of integrating the two services, but I'm not holding my breath.

[ludditerobot.livejournal.com]

Does your website have Perl available? Is it on a Unix or Unix-like server or is it IIS?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

My home one is hosted by ntlworld, and they don't seem to want people to do any scripting etc. The other one I use is hosted by Cedant and I think is Unix based. Trouble is that I'm so pig-ignorant of this side of things that any attempt to mess about with it at a programming level is likely to end in tears.

[ludditerobot.livejournal.com]

OK. Do you mind if this isn't hosted by you, then? Because generating RSS is a hobby of mine. I created an RSS for Roger Ebert's movie reviews that generated a good number of hits per month (into the millions) and I used to RSS CNN until they got their act together and started doing it.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Do you mind if this isn't hosted by you, then?

Not in the least. How would it work? I send you announcements, you add them to the feed? Bear in mind, we're talking an announcement evry couple of months, but I would like them readable all the time. Can that be done easily, or for that level of traffic might it be more trouble than it's worth for you.

[ludditerobot.livejournal.com]

My server is a machine hosted by the Linux User Group (or the campus chapter of the Computer Society of the Association for Computing Machinery, it's interconnected) of a large American university. They pay no fees to the University for this privilege and I pay no fees to the groups for the privilege. Looking at the usage statistics on the machine, my Ebert and CNN feeds have been, by far, the top hits on the server, going into the millions of hits (820000 so far this month), and nobody has ever given me a bit of harsh over it.

I know. Nice hosting if you can get it. Membership has it's privileges and all other cliches.

And the way I prefer to do this (not that I can't do it another way) is to take a webpage, parse it for the content I want and spit it out in an RSS into a web directory. We can do it other ways, but that's I do for my feeds and my sooper-sekrit web-comic page.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Oh - that wasn't really what I had in mind at all - basically, the idea was to put stuff on to my site this way, and let other people use the news if they wanted. Never mind, I'll persevere with the livejournal thing instead.

[ludditerobot.livejournal.com]

There are other things we could do, too. You could install Perl and a few modules and I could whip you up a script that spits out an RSS you could put in your normal web directory.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I'll need to find out if my hosting bods will let me do it.

[ludditerobot.livejournal.com]

I'm talking on your local machine.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Oh right. That sounds good.