Tuesday, January 3rd, 2006

LibraryThing adds 151,440 RSS/HTML feeds

LibraryThing has added 151,440 XML/RSS feeds, and an equal number of HTML versions of the feeds. Someone asked for “feeds for everything.” This is pretty close.

LibraryThing now offers five types of feeds:

  • Recent books added by a member. Follow what a user is reading.
  • Recent reviews by a member. Follow what a user is saying about books.
  • Recent reviews of books a member owns. Find out what other people are saying about your books.
  • Recent books tagged something. Follow new items for any tag in LibraryThing.
  • Recent reviews of books tagged something. Follow reviews for any tag in LibraryThing.

As you probably know, RSS feeds look like . To work with them you need some sort of feed reader, such as Bloglines. You can also plug them into your Google homepage and many other “start pages.”

If you don’t use a feed reader—I don’t!—I’ve provided an HTML version for every RSS feed. I’ve given these links the icon .

At present feeds are updated every twenty minutes. If usage is high I may need to cut that back a bit.

How you can help. I know bloggers love RSS feeds, so I’m asking for your help spreading the word. (Some people never signed up because of this issue!) And, as usual, I’d love help debugging and expanding the feature. Is there anything I’m missing?

Also, the HTML version is something of a hack; I’m having a deuce of a time getting PHP5’s XSLT support to work. Charitable PHP hackers are invited to email and find out just how clueless I am about this sort of thing.

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