Monday, 08 January 2007

• Taking food from the feedless

  Last year, Xanga introduced a ton of new privacy features, mostly in the form of "locks". I hate them. It used to be you could hop around Xanga and read anything you found. Now, every other link I click takes me to a closed door. Not a good thing on a "social" site, but I supposed they have to protect "the children".

  The "lock" that really chaps my ass is the Footprints Lock. There's only one privacy setting that actually affords you any privacy, in the traditional sense of internet privacy: the Footprints setting, which lets you specify whether or not you want your username to be tracked in the footprint logs of the sites you visit. The Footprints Lock prevents you from visiting a site unless you are willing to be tracked. It's anti-privacy.

  That's ok, because after all, we have to protect "the children". But there's a sizable subculture of paranoid adults here on Xanga that have opted in to all of these features, including the Footprints Lock. What is wrong with you people? Don't you have real, grown-up things to worry about instead of obsessing over knowing who's been reading your site? When you turn on that Footprints Lock, you're basically saying "Screw you, reader! My sad, pathetic, obsessive need to know exactly who is reading my site is far more important than your privacy." Gee, thanks... freak.

  But, to get to the actual point of this entry, what chaps my already-chapped ass even further are the people who disable their RSS feeds, even on an otherwise unlocked, public site. They type their entries, post them on a public website on the public internet, and then they say "Screw you, reader! You can't read my site unless you read it at my site, with its tiny illegible dark-grey-on-black fonts and and its technoklezmerspeedmetal background music. Oh, and since you're here, you might as well feed my aforementioned sad, pathetic, obsessive need to know exactly who is reading my site, so screw you twice!"

  One rationale for this is that apparently using an RSS aggregator is stealing. What. The. Hell. Hey Dread, the RIAA could use more people like you.

  Maybe the only real time I have to read your precious content is during my commute, on a PDA-based aggregator. Or maybe my vision is impaired, or I'm completely blind, and it just so happens that a certain feed aggregator has the exact accesibility features I need. Or maybe an RSS-to-email service is the only way I can get certain types of information past the firewalls run by my oppressive, xenophobic, culture-hating government. Or maybe I just want to use a goddammed feed aggregator because that's what I want, goddamnit.

  When you disable the RSS feed on your otherwise public site, you're dictating when, where, and how people can read your site. When you do that, you become DRM. DRM sucks. You suck. Even worse, you suck by choice. You suck, you're screwing people over, and now I'm going to screw you right back, you feed-hating DRMish hybrid freak.

  There's a great site out there called Feed43 (pronounced "Feed For Free") that will, with a bit of effort on your part, scrape the content from a site and generate a feed from it. Technically, you're supposed to get permission from a site's owner before you scrape it, but we're working on principle here, and it wouldn't be much of a "screw you" if we asked permission.
  

  Here's how you can use Feed43 to get a feed from a Xanga site that has its feed disabled:

  1. Go to the Feed43 home page and click the "Create Your Own Feed" link.
  2. In the "Address" field, enter the URL of the Xanga site you want to scrape, then click the "Reload" button. The HTML source of the site should appear in a box below the button.
  3. Scroll down to "Item (repeatable) Search Pattern" and enter the following: <h4 class="itemTitle">{%}</h4>{%}</td></tr><tr><td width="5%"><p></p></td><td valign="top" align="left"><div class="smalltext"><a class="snap_nopreview" href="{%}">{*}</a>
  4. Click the "Extract" button. The data we need should appear in a box below the button.
  5. Scroll down to the section labeled "RSS Item Properties".
  6. In the "Item Title Template" field, enter {%1}
  7. In the "Item Link Template" field, enter {%3}
  8. In the "Item Content Template" field, enter {%2}
  9. Click the "Preview" button. A preview of the feed should appear in a box below the button.
  10. Below that box will be the URL of the generated feed. Grab it, plug it into your aggregator, and enjoy. There will also be a URL that you can use to go back and tweak all of those settings if you need to - bookmark it or save it somewhere for future use.

  Here is a freakishly tall screenshot of what this page should look like when everything is filled in, using my own site as an example. It's ok, I got permission from the owner.

  (One caveat: this exact procedure won't work on a site that's using a custom Xanga skin. You'll need to create a different search pattern in step 3 up there. RTFM. It's easy.)

  So, there you have it. IN YOUR FACE, FREAK!

  Admittedly, this registers at the low end of the cosmic "screw you" scale.. but it's still a nice bit of righteous subversion.

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