(no subject)

[zwol]

I'm trying out this RSS feed-reader thing for the first time in years and years — I tried it in maybe 2002? and it didn't do what I wanted and I gave up. It still doesn't really do what I want, but it's a whole lot closer now, to the point where maybe it's worth trying to find add-on solutions.

My use case is pretty simple. I want the feed-reader to replace the list of bookmarked blogs and webcomics that I check obsessively, so that the computer is doing the obsessive checking for me. For this to work, it's got to replace the entire list, otherwise I'll just keep obsessively checking the ones that aren't included. Also, all the content that I want to read needs to show up in the feed-reader, because clicking through is slow and requires me to mentally context switch over to web-browsing. Thus, I have two problems: sites with no RSS feed, and sites that provide title-only or first-paragraph-only feeds.

It seems to me that there ought to be feed-readers or feed-reader plugins out there that can compensate for these, by screen-scraping sites with no RSS feeds and/or chasing links from sites with incomplete-content RSS feeds. Can anyone recommend such devices?

(Also, is there any way to get an LJ basic account's friends page, with locked posts, as RSS? No, I am not willing to give LJ either money or ads.)

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[leonardr.livejournal.com]

Screen-scraping sites with no RSS feeds is equivalent to creating a bootleg RSS feed and using it. There are sites like RSSPECT that will let you create bootleg feeds, but you need to do each site separately or seek out an existing feed for each site separately.

The good news is that a partial solution works well in practice. Obsessively checking a small list of RSSless feeds is less work than obsessively checking a big list. And coverage is much, much better than it used to be. I've got an RSS feed for everything I want to read regularly, though admittedly my reading is a little skewed towards tech stuff.

[echristo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I use a feed reader for most everything these days. About the only thing I read that doesn't have a feed are a couple of web comics and lj. Though I'm starting to just aggregate the lj feeds I care about instead of using the friends interface - except for the friends-only problem you mentioned. If there was a "look at locked posts only" I wouldn't have to check as often :)

LJ to feed

[falsedrow.livejournal.com]

Does this do about what you want?

ljfriendfeed-local

Re: LJ to feed

[zwol.livejournal.com]

That looks like it solves the parenthetical part of my question very nicely, but I can't figure out how to actually use the thing! A bit more explanation on how to hook it up with liferea please?

Re: LJ to feed

[falsedrow.livejournal.com]

New subscription, Source Type -> Command, Source -> Full path to script. Fill in the commented bits at the top of the script in your copy.

I also found I needed to check "use conversion filter", and enter "iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8". This fixes not all, but many of the cases where liferea fails to validate documents. It treats them as XHTML, i.e. XML, and LJ is perhaps not quite as conformant as it could be.

Re: LJ to feed

[zwol.livejournal.com]

Thanks, that makes sense. I'll try it tomorrow.