Syndicate this!

Rob [1] and I were talking the other day about a feature of LiveJournal [2]—the friend's page. If you have an account on LiveJournal, you can list other users of LiveJournal as “friends” and then read their new entries on your “friends” page. It basically collects the X most recent posts from all your friends (who have to have LiveJournal accounts themselves) and presents them on a single page, only with a style you choose.

I have a LiveJournal account [3], if only to read the journals of my friends [4] who are hosted there. If you check my friends page [5], you'll see that I picked a rather conservative style. Yet visit the actual site of any of my friends [6] and you'll see their words in a different style.

Which leads me to yesterday's post [7] about styles, only coming in from a different perspective. This time it's not about historic perspective (although Michelle [8] has changed the default template of her site since I started reading it; I'm not sure when she made the change since I mostly read her through my friends page, which is a different style altogether) but about current presentation through a form of syndication.

Ah, syndication. Most blogging software supports syndication via one of the several flavors of RSS (Rich Site Summary) (in order, 0.9 [9], 0.91 [10], 0.92 [11], 1.0 [12], 0.93 [13] or 0.94 [14]—yes, that is the correct order and no, I'm not about to get into the why of it right now), an XML (eXtensible Markup Language) based file that contains the interesting bits from a weblog—author, last date updated, and the last few entries. So in theory, it is possible to make a “friends” page reguardless if you have a LiveJournal account or not, and to include more than just friends on LiveJournal.

While I like the “friends page” feature of LiveJournal (as I use it) I'm not so sure how I feel about it though. I only include the links and titles to each of my entries, although I could include the actual entry itself in the RSS file. I didn't though, since I was uneasy with the idea that someone could reformat my content to suit themselves. Which is odd, since browsers will do that anyway (like under Lynx (Screen Shot of Lynx; 11k) [15], or Netscape 4x (Screen Shot of Netscape 4x; 21k) [16] or IE (Screen Shot of IE; 34k) [17] or Mozilla (Screen Shot of Mozilla; 56k) [18]) and I'm much less concerned about that.

For instance, the feed [19] for Marcus' [20] site does contain the entries themselves, so it's possible I could pull that down and format his content to my liking, even though he spent over a month working the style of his website to his liking. I wonder how he would feel knowing someone was reading his stuff if it looked different? [21] Yet a “friends page” is exactly what he wants though (since he was one (out of several) that pestered me to get email notification going for my site). And how would I feel if someone was formatting my stuff differently? [22]

[1] http://www.tragic-smurfs.com/

[2] http://www.livejournal.com/

[3] http://www.livejournal.com/users/spc476

[4] http://www.livejournal.com/users/spc476/friends

[5] http://www.livejournal.com/users/spc476/friends

[6] http://www.livejournal.com/users/resilient/

[7] /boston/2002/07/23.1

[8] http://www.livejournal.com/users/resilient/

[9] http://my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-0.9.dtd

[10] http://www.scripting.com/netscapeDocs/RSS%200_91%20Spec,%20revision%203.html

[11] http://backend.userland.com/rss092

[12] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-dev/files/namespace.html