RSS feed!

[mabfan]

Using News Fire, a wonderful little program for the Macintosh that etrevino pointed me towards, I have discovered that this blog apparently has an RSS feed available at http://mabfan.livejournal.com/data/rss. I have no idea how to tell you how to add it to your own site, but I am delighted to offer this service to my visitors. (There is also apparently a feed available at http://mabfan.livejournal.com/data/atom.)

If anyone can point me towards information explaining how to work with RSS feeds, I will be very grateful. So far, all I know is that LiveJournal syndicates them, which is how I have people like bob_greenberger on my Friends page.

Comments

[queue.livejournal.com]

Basically, people use an RSS aggregator to gather all the feeds that they want to read into one place. Like you say, people on LJ can just use LJ as an aggregator (of course, then they would have no need to link to the RSS feed, since they can just add you as a friend). So for a non-LJ person, they could just point their aggregator at that URL.

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

So that explains how come I found my LJ content listed on someone else's webpage as an Aggregator. I suppose at some point I should consider adding a copyright notice...

[queue.livejournal.com]

I'm sure someone can speak to this better than I can, but the copyright issues with RSS feeds are a bit tricky. By supplying an RSS feed, you are implicitly giving people rights to use it in certain ways. Of course, LiveJournal forces you to have an RSS feed (as far as I know, there's no way to disable this feature). So, while a copyright notice isn't a bad idea, it might be difficult to enforce under certain circumstances.

At least that's the way I understand it.

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

The only point of a copyright notice would be to make sure no one else makes money off the posts. Something like, "Copyright Michael A. Burstein. All rights reserved. You may download all this content for free via an RSS feed to any webpage you wish, so long as you do not charge others for the content. You may not publish the content in a fixed hardcopy medium."

In case I ever want to publish all these entries as a book. I figure I could sell at least two copies.

[zhaneel69.livejournal.com]

Meh... I guess. I've never considering copyrighting my blog stuff. Nor has John Scalzi whose gone on to sell two novels from his blog [to Tor & Subterrian Press), several articles, and a couple of humor entries.

Without the copyright.

Zhaneel

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

I didn't say registering the copyright, just putting up the copyright notice. Are you sure he hasn't put up a notice somewhere? Because if he hasn't, someone else could reprint his work from the webpage without permission and not owe him anything legally. If he sued, he'd probably be able to get statutory damages, but not punitive.

I have a catch-all copyright notice as a link from my webpage.

[zhaneel69.livejournal.com]

Pretty sure he doesn't have one, from my experience of reading the page and just doing a quick check. Didn't see one.

My (uninformed) knowledge was that if a webspace was registered to you and you can prove you wrote the piece, it was 'copyrighted' w/o registering the copyright. You could go to court and sue over it. I could be very, very, very, very wrong of course. Webspace being different than journal 'cause the posting date is time-stamped and whatnot. With IP that belongs to you [or at least belongs to the block you use via your ISP].

Zhaneel

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

I went checking at http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html and was surprised to discover that apparently the copyright notice is no longer necessary to claim copyright on a work. However, they still say it's a good idea.

From http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#noc :

"The use of a copyright notice is no longer required under U. S. law, although it is often beneficial. Because prior law did contain such a requirement, however, the use of notice is still relevant to the copyright status of older works."

and

"Use of the notice may be important because it informs the public that the work is protected by copyright, identifies the copyright owner, and shows the year of first publication. Furthermore, in the event that a work is infringed, if a proper notice of copyright appears on the published copy or copies to which a defendant in a copyright infringement suit had access, then no weight shall be given to such a defendant's interposition of a defense based on innocent infringement in mitigation of actual or statutory damages, except as provided in section 504(c)(2) of the copyright law. Innocent infringement occurs when the infringer did not realize that the work was protected."

When you said that Scalzi had sold work "without the copyright," I presume you meant without the copyright notice? If he didn't own the copyright, Tor could have published his novels without needing to contract with him.

Anyway, the upshot is that I guess I don't need to include a notice. Apparently, none of us do.

[zhaneel69.livejournal.com]

I meant that there was no copyright on the webspace (original publication) and that he later went on to sell the pieces (which were then copyrighted for that format & distribution).

Obviously, as he's written the pieces, he owns the copyright.

Zhaneel

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

I'm still not sure I understand. Do you mean that there was no copyright on the original publication, or no copyright notice?

If he had no copyright on the original publication, then all that work would be in the public domain, and anyone could reprint it in any form without paying him anything.

I think we're experiencing the phenomenon Samuel Delany called "rupture," where we're not using terms to mean the same thing. To me, the word "copyright" means the actual exclusive right for the owner to reproduce and license the work. I suspect you're using the word "copyright" to mean what I think of as the copyright notice.

Do you see my confusion? Saying he sold the publication rights of his online novels to Tor without the copyright means to me that he sold rights which didn't exist. But on the other hand, he could easily have sold the novels to Tor even if he hadn't put a copyright notice up on his webpage, as the Library of Congress now apparently doesn't require one to put up the notice to assert one's copyright ownership (although they used to, just like they used to require registration).

[zhaneel69.livejournal.com]

I do mean copyright notice. Sorry. No copyright notice, but John owns the copyright, so could sell the work to Tor who then put a copyright notice on that edition of hte work.

Better?

Zhaneel

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

Exactly! As I thought, we were talking about the same thing, but with different words.

Although now I'm curious to know what copyright year the book edition bears...and other questions come to mind, such as award eligiblity issues.

Fodder for another post.

[swashbucklr]

Neil Gaiman put a lot of his blog into a book that sold at Boskone two years ago. I'm sure you could sell your content, too. ;)

There's something about a book that the internet just can't match.

Yet.

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

We have that book! I'm not sure how well another blogged book would sell, though, and I'm pretty sure one by me would sell like snow in winter. :-)

[sethg]

Both RSS 2.0 and Atom have an optional slot for putting in copyright information, although your LJ's feeds don't use those slots.

[ckd]

RSS (and Atom, which is like RSS and I will not go into the whole discussion of different syndication formats right now) is basically a way to format the content part of a blog or LJ or other web site so that it can be put into a newsreader, stuffed into a sidebar on another site, or the like without having to figure out where the actual content is in the original version of the web page.

Things that read RSS are usually called newsreaders if they run as an application on your computer, or aggregators if they run on a web server somewhere.

LJ lets you create syndications accounts like bob_greenberger or dirac_angestun, which are basically LiveJournal's servers doing the RSS fetching and parsing and then making it look sort of like a LiveJournal account.

I tried NewsFire, but eventually went with NetNewsWire. There's a free Lite version or the pay version with more features. (I paid.)

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

So does this mean that so long as I give the web addresses I gave above, someone can feed it into their newsreader and get the content?

What if I want to redesign my LJ front page, to look more like a real blog? Can I include RSS feeds there too?

[ckd]

Yes, as long as someone has the URL of the feed, they can add it to their reader.

If you add links to your RSS/Atom feeds so that people can find them easily to your LJ front page, that would work nicely.

I don't read LJ on LJ any more...

[happypete.livejournal.com]

[well, sometimes I do]...

I use an aggregator called Awasu and a technology called OPML that lets you define a "group" of RSS feeds and import them in Awasu]. Awasu can even use digest authentication or browser cookies to download protected entries.

This way I don't have to worry about missing posts--as long as I log in every so often I can get all the posts downloaded.

Now my problem is that I am NEVER actually caught up. I have, generally, about 175 blogs that have at least one entry I haven't read yet.

I also have some other RSS feeds like /., MSDN, etc., in my Awasu.

Re: I don't read LJ on LJ any more...

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

175 blogs? That's a lot, but I can see that happening to me. The problem is that we're becoming overwhelmed with information, since the delivery system has become so frictionless. I don't think I'll ever be "caught up" in all that I want to be.

Re: I don't read LJ on LJ any more...

[happypete.livejournal.com]

heh...I'm sure there's a story in there....

y'know, now that I think about it--there's all these stories where Our Here just sits down at some random terminal, logs in so easily it's barely ever even mentioned, and instantly gets the blood type of their great-great-grandfather's second mistress's cousin...

I'm a reader, not a writer...if you want it, you play with it!

Re: I don't read LJ on LJ any more...

[happypete.livejournal.com]

and that's supposed to be "Hero," clearly I'm not an editor, either!

[zhaneel69.livejournal.com]

I use Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com) to read atom feeds (for site's like Niel Gaiman's blog, Farah Mendleson's, Toby Buckwell, etc.) and my G-blog RSS reader for non-Atom feeds. My g-blog is syndicated via RSS and you can see on LJ via gblog_zhaneel.

All the above is correct:
RSS (sometimes provided by the blogging service, like LJ or G-blog, and sometimes needing to be implemented on personal sites) allows normal pages to be syndicated by various services. It allows you to know where there are new updates without visiting the main page.

Zhaneel

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

I'm adding all these blogs to my News Fire program as well, so I can read everyone twice!

[zhaneel69.livejournal.com]

A true info glutton. ;-)

Zhaneel

[zhaneel69.livejournal.com]

FYI, my blog roll from Bloglines.

For my G-blog stuff, I have the following list, and I can look up RSS feeds for specific ones:
AFK Gamer (WoW blog)
BBC News | Science & Nature section
BBC News | World | UK Edition [I like seeing how US is represented here]
Boing Boing.net
By The Way [John Scalzi's AOL blog]
California Insider [CA Politics]
Fury.com [Friend's blog, techie & well known blogger, though he's been light recently]
In the Pipeline [Drug Industry blog]
Making Light (TNH's blog)
ScienceDaily Headlines [Science Blog]
The Slush God Speaketh [JJA's blog]
Wil Wheaton.net [Wil's blog]
Whatever [John Scalzi's personal blog]
Wizards.com Books [WotC's book page, for tracking open call annoucements]

Zhaneel

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

Ack! Must...add...feeds!

[zhaneel69.livejournal.com]

Did you want any of the URLs/RSS URLs for the above feeds?

Zhaneel

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

The News Fire program actually finds them for me. One of the commands is for it to look for RSS feeds from an open webpage on Safari. So I don't need the URLs, but I appreciate the offer. (I figure I'll just go through your blogroll on my own...)

[ckd]

If you'd like, I can export my NetNewsWire subscription list and send it along as well.

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

Sure! I'll take any I can get.

I was delighted to see that New Scientist has a whole bunch of RSS feeds...

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

On second thought, what's the URL for these:

BBC News | Science & Nature section
BBC News | World | UK Edition [I like seeing how US is represented here]
Boing Boing.net
Making Light (TNH's blog)
ScienceDaily Headlines [Science Blog]

Thanks!

[zhaneel69.livejournal.com]

What follows are the RSS feed URLs, so don't go clicking them unless you can parse RSS yourself:

BBC News | Science & Nature Section

BBC News | World | UK Edition

Boing Boing.net

Making Light [Note: .rdf which I think is RSS 1.0]

Science Daily Headlines

Zhaneel

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[sethg]

My Bloglines subscription list is here.

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

I took a look at your verbose feed list. Gack! How do you read them all?

[sethg]

I skim.

Also, sometimes I download all the unread entries to my Palm (yay for PDAs with wireless Ethernet) and read them on the bus.