Individual custom feeds?

December 17, 2005 7:26 AM

I'm starting a new blog on a wide-ranging and ever-shifting set of topics, and I want to let my readers choose which of those topics to follow via RSS. I could offer tons of separate feeds, but many of these would be ephemeral, so I'd want to make it really easy to unsubscribe. Ideally, each user would get a single custom feed, the content of which they could control from my site (see here and here). Is there any way of doing this?

I've considered the following solutions, but they're all pretty kludgy, and I was hoping someone here might suggest something more elegant.

* Email listserves offer convenient "unsubscribe" links under every post -- maybe I could process them through something like Mailbucket.
* An RSS splicer like Blogdigger groups could also do the trick, but there would have to be a bookmarklet or some other way to add (and remove) feeds from outside the site.
* I've also thought of using forum or wiki software, because they often have "watchlist" features that let users follow certain authors or threads. But I don't know if any of these watchlists offer rss feeds.
* I could use the del.icio.us inbox, but Pasta seems to have gone kaput.

posted by jsbww to computers & internet (10 comments total)

Suppose you had a script which generated RSS feeds in the form:

http://www.example.com/rss.php?tech=1&law=1&gardening=1

This would generate an RSS feed containing the topics tech, law and gardening. The url:

http://www.example.com/rss.php?tech=1&gardening=1

would contain the topics tech and gardening.

You could have a selection box where a user would select the topics to which to subscribe and this url would be generated. Then, to change subscriptions, the user would remove the feed he has and generate a new feed using your web based form.

This would remove the necessity of scores of feeds and would make it easy to change subscription options.
posted by null terminated at 8:12 AM on December 17, 2005

Thanks. Unfortunately I wouldn't know how to code this - do you know if there's any code out there that would do the trick? Also, I'd prefer a solution where the URL wouldn't change, so the user could make all changes from the website. If the scripting required for such a thing wouldn't be too involved, I'd be willing to invest the time to learn how to do it.
posted by jsbww at 9:21 AM on December 17, 2005

If you don't know how to code null terminated's simple suggestion, you won't know how to code any sort of subscription management system. I think you should reconsider the benefits vs. drawbacks of trying to move users away from their comfortable methods of subscribing, aggregating, and unsubscribing in their preferred feed readers. As a regular feed reader, I don't want to have to learn a new interface to do these things my feed reading software alredy does perfectly well.
posted by scottreynen at 9:39 AM on December 17, 2005

If the URL wouldn't be changing, you could have a password protected RSS feed which would be customized to each user's preferences. They would log into the system and choose which feeds to add to their subscription. The problem with this would be forcing users to sign up, managing their preferences and the problem of password protected feeds and the lack of RSS clients which support SSL (if SSL weren't used the password wouldn't be encrypted).

It seems like creating an entire feed management system for one blog would be overkill.
posted by null terminated at 10:04 AM on December 17, 2005

blosxom does this automatically. My blog is at http://www.example.com/. My posts about technology are all in http://www.example.com/tech/. If you hit that URL it looks like a whole standalone blog, but just about technology. But the root URL contains all my posts, tech or otherwise. The cool thing is that http://www.example.com/tech/index.rss and http://www.example.com/index.rss also work. The former is an RSS feed just of tech posts, the latter is all posts.

This all works out of the box in Blosxom, but in other ways you may find Blosxom limited. It's great software if you like tinkering with installing plugins and running your own software.
posted by Nelson at 10:05 AM on December 17, 2005

Nelson: wouldn't blosxom be offering the tons of separate feeds jsbww doesn't want?
posted by null terminated at 10:09 AM on December 17, 2005

How's this?

Let's say I wanted to do this as a WordPress plugin. WP already has basic account management built in, for commenting, so that's taken care of. This plugin would do the following things:

1) implement null terminated's suggestion. So http://www.example.com/rss.php?tech=1&gardening=1 produces an rss feed with my posts about tech and gardening.

2) add a pane to each user's WP options, called "Feed Preferences." This would amount to a series of checkboxes - say, "tech," "gardening," "law." A script would convert the user's selections into a URL for rss.php, which would then be stored in the WP database.

3) create a page for each user, let's say UserName.xml. This page would redirect each user to their particular rss url.

4) each post in the rss feed lists the categories it's filed under, with an x next to each one. Clicking on that x brings you to your WP options page and automatically disables that particular category.

In response to scottreynen's concern about forcing users to learn a new interface, I think this would be intuitive enough that any confusion would be easily outweighed by the added convenience.

So who wants to code this, or point me towards how I could start learning to do it myself?
posted by jsbww at 12:25 PM on December 17, 2005

Re: the last two comments from nelson and null terminated.

I like blosxom a lot, and I wouldn't mind lots of feeds if the user didn't have to manage them from within their feed reader. That would require some kind of user management, but considering that user management is more or less ubiquitious with web apps, I doubt it would be too hard to implement with publically available code.

Yes one feed is better than lots of feeds, but the reason I wasn't satisfied with null terminated's initial suggestion is that today's aggregators make feed management such a pain in the ass, even just changing one subscription.

It's so easy to subscribe to a feed - just click a bookmarklet. But if I want to unsubscribe, I have to log into my feed reader, go to the options, and find the feeds from a long list.

(Speaking of which, why don't "subscribe" bookmarklets turn into "unsubscribe" bookmarklets for feeds you're already subscribed to? It would be sweet if you could just "star" and "un-star" a feed, a la gmail. But I digress...)

The problem is exacerbated if you like to try different feed readers, as I do. In most cases, the only way to migrate subscriptions from one aggregator to another, is to export the opml from the old one and import it to the new one. But the exporting step doesn't seem worth the bother, if I already have an opml file on my drive with 95% of my feeds.

The result is I almost never subscribe to new feeds. Because a) I don't want to go through the trouble of unsubscribing the ones I dont' like, and b) it's annoying to export a new opml every time I try a new feed reader - at least as long as feed readers are being released at their current pace.
posted by jsbww at 12:49 PM on December 17, 2005

Oh, one more thing - unless I'm missing something, individual user feeds wouldn't have to be password protected - just the user pages to change them. And WP already takes care of that.
posted by jsbww at 12:55 PM on December 17, 2005

I understand what you're looking for now, jsbww, but I can't think of a product that offers it. But since you're looking for ideas..

I'd much rather configure what I read in my feedreader than on a web site. I don't find it a pain at all to unsubscribe from a feed in my reader (FeedDemon). I'm reading something and I find it boring, and I right click and unsubscribe. Very easy. By contrast if you have some server-managed system of what I'm subscribed to I have to go to your site, possibly log in, and configure it. And the UI would be different on every site. At least in a reader it's a consistent unsubscribe UI.
posted by Nelson at 8:21 AM on December 19, 2005