RSS ‘n’ stuff
(I tried to keep this mostly relatively non-technical, but it got away from me toward the end.)
There's this thing called RSS. The general idea is that a website provides a regularly-updated file that other sites can download; that file contains information about the latest updates to the site. The sites that download that file can then display information about the latest updates to the originating site.
For example, Slashdot provides an RSS "feed"—an XML file containing the title and URL of each of the latest articles posted there. If your site has an RSS "aggregator" (basically software that takes an RSS file and turns it into a displayable form), you can display a little box on your page (next to your journal, say) containing the titles of all recent Slashdot postings and links to those postings.
It occurred to me recently that we could easily set up an RSS feed for SH, to be updated once a week, and then anyone who wanted to (and who had access to an aggregator) could put a little sidebar on their page showing the current week's material at SH.
And not long after I started looking into that, Josh told me that LiveJournal paid users can add RSS feeds to their Friends page.
So I've set up an automatically generated RSS feed for my journal, just to get a better feel for how all this works. Josh kindly set it up at the LiveJournal end; in theory, if any paid user of LJ adds user jedediah to their Friends list, they'll get links to my recent journal entries on their Friends page.
I say "theoretically" because we don't have it working quite yet. But once it works, I'll probably add the text of the entries to the RSS feed, so that people with paid LJ accounts will be able to view my entries on their Friends page.
As would anyone else with an RSS aggregator, of course. If you have access to such software, you can set up your own equivalent of an LJ Friends page outside of LJ—and in fact, all LJ accounts generate RSS feeds automatically (but with only the entry titles and links, not the full text), so you could sort of create your own LJ Friends page.
There's a nifty tutorial titled "Using RSS News Feeds" at WebReference, which provides a simple Perl script to download, parse, and display an RSS feed. I spent far too long this evening making this work; the hard part turned out to be installing a bunch of Perl modules on my Mac. I eventually got that working; the rest was trivial. And it turned out that Pair already has those modules installed, so I could've just tried their code directly in Pair from the start. Ah, well.
Anyway, the upshot of all that is that I'm pretty confident that I can both generate and parse/display RSS feeds, though I don't know all the ins and outs yet. If we set up an SH feed, I'll probably try displaying it as a sidebar on this journal page, at least for a while. Maybe I'll throw in some boingboing items as well. We'll see.