Embed an RSS feed

Weblog
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I think this actually is something @adam mentioned; I couldn’t find it on GitHub in issues or discussions so I thought I’d put it here.

Basically, this would let someone display the (presumably configurable) contents of an RSS feed in a template.

One use case: my linklog, which currently runs on JavaScript.

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I totally dig this idea, @bix . I can think of embedding my latest read books, latest watched TV shows and several other bits of information using RSS embedding.

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This will be a fun challenge! I’m currently trying to think about how best to do it, factoring in how people would want to use it and what would work/feel best in the context of the different kinds of patterns that have been established so far in weblog.lol. Regarding that last bit, I’m also worried about straying too far from the established patterns, which I worry that I’ve already started to do in a couple of places.

So I’d appreciate any thoughts to help me think this through. Tossing out some random questions:

  1. Would people expect these feeds to be displayed on their own pages, or would there be a desire for them to be handled as more atomic units that could be dropped anywhere (such as within other pages, posts, and templates)?

  2. Is it safe to say that parsing RSS, Atom, and JSON feeds would be sufficient? Are there any other feed formats out there that we’d need to support?

  3. Beyond the obvious title, body, and date fields, are there others that you’d want to work with as variables? I suppose date might actually wind up being two fields (don’t have any specs in front of me but I think there are creation dates and modification dates).

  4. Are there other general considerations for feed parsing or any specific behaviors/sub-features that anyone would want to see related to this?

Thanks!

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Thanks for jumping into the loop, I’ll be trying to answer your questions, @adam, considering my use case, which, as I’ve mentioned before, would be to list books read, TV episodes watched, so on and so forth.

  1. I could perfectly go with displaying feed items on my page, for example, the 5 or 10 latest books I’ve read, the latest links I’ve saved to Raindrop, etc. But I can also think of it in a scenario where every new feed item becomes a weblog.lol post which, in the future, people can interact with, for example, reacting by commenting. So every feed item is actually crossposted to the weblog.

  2. I’m not aware of other feed formats other than RSS, ATOM and JSON, so I guess we’d be safe with supporting only these for the time being.

  3. If a feed item has an image, parsing it to a variable would be nice so it could be displayed in landing pages or archive pages stylized beside the title and date. Use case, again, that comes to my mind, are book covers, movie posters and the like.

  4. I’ve been a long time user of feed readers and to me they’re very functional in their simplicity. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I can’t think of any specific behavior right now.

I hope these simple contribution from a non-technical person like myself is able to start the discussion up. Thanks again for being so kind in tending to our wishes.

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I can’t even think beyond my own use case, which would just be to replace my JavaScript on my linklog page with a native thing. So in my case I’d just need to be able to display a linked title and maybe a date.

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