New and improved Friends-page news feed style
I've created a custom journal style that lets you subscribe to your LiveJournal Friends page in your favorite RSS/Atom news-reader application (Safari, NetNewsWire, FeedDemon, etc.)
Why Is This Cool?
• A news-reader will automatically check for new posts and download them in the background.
• It can notify you of new unread posts.
• You can read posts when you're offline, like on a train.
• It can archive and index all your friends' posts, making them easily browseable and searchable.
• You can read your friends' journals in the same application you use to read other blogs and news sites.
Isn't There Already A Style That Does This?
There are two earlier RSS styles that I've found. Mine is based on one of them, but it's improved:
• It gets the times right. The earlier styles didn't handle posts from other time-zones correctly.
• It shows the quality LiveJournal metadata you expect: userpics, mood, music, friends-only status, author names in community posts.
• It generates Atom, which is a newer, better-designed feed format. News-readers all support Atom as well as RSS, so the only difference this should make to you is that it's less likely there will be parsing problems that cause some of the text or titles to be garbled, which can happen with RSS.
Here's a screenshot of what a post looks like in Safari's news-reader:
How To Install It.
(Read on for the directions...)
Why Is This Cool?
• A news-reader will automatically check for new posts and download them in the background.
• It can notify you of new unread posts.
• You can read posts when you're offline, like on a train.
• It can archive and index all your friends' posts, making them easily browseable and searchable.
• You can read your friends' journals in the same application you use to read other blogs and news sites.
Isn't There Already A Style That Does This?
There are two earlier RSS styles that I've found. Mine is based on one of them, but it's improved:
• It gets the times right. The earlier styles didn't handle posts from other time-zones correctly.
• It shows the quality LiveJournal metadata you expect: userpics, mood, music, friends-only status, author names in community posts.
• It generates Atom, which is a newer, better-designed feed format. News-readers all support Atom as well as RSS, so the only difference this should make to you is that it's less likely there will be parsing problems that cause some of the text or titles to be garbled, which can happen with RSS.
Here's a screenshot of what a post looks like in Safari's news-reader:
How To Install It.
(Read on for the directions...)