use.perl.org Syndicated on LiveJournal

jjohn on 2002-10-30T15:25:47

An anonymous coward writes "You LiveJournal addicts out there might want to know that you can now add a syndicated feed of use.perl.org to your friends list.

Instructions here."

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Syndicated use perl feed for LJ

torin on 2002-10-30T17:05:23

I'll have to try this again. When they first added syndicated feeds many of the items were duplicated and just a touch annoying. Hopefully it works better now.

Only for paid users?

pne on 2002-10-31T16:37:00

When I tried it, I got the message "Sorry - Your account type doesn't allow befriending syndicated accounts." I guess it's only for paying users. (Which I'm not yet, partly because their signup page still goes to an old PayPal page whose SSL certificate expired.)

But still, the duplication is still there. Have a look at the URL given -- tons of items are in duplicate, triplicate, and multiplied in general. (I wonder whether a new item is created whenever someone replies to an article? That would suck to have the same headline appear 20 times if it's a popular article and many people reply to it.)

Re:Only for paid users?

Mart on 2002-11-01T12:57:34

There is some checking in the code for duplicates, based on an MD5 hash of the syndicated data. When this data changes in some way, a duplicate will be created.

We're working on improving the RSS feed 'sucking' code as well as the mechanism which runs it to make it more robust. Since LiveJournal is written in perl and is open-source, perhaps use perl users who are also LiveJournal users might want to take a look at the code and offer some ideas. There's a development community at LiveJournal called lj_dev where improvements and fixes can be discussed.

Syndication accounts only being subscribable to paid accounts is, I assume, done because pulling in lots of syndication data uses up quite a bit of bandwidth, and if every user were to create a syndication account LiveJournal would soon be pulling in more data than it's sending out. There's also a system in place which limits the number of feeds each user can 'watch', although any users are free to make use of an active RSS feed through its own journal 'front page'.