Arts & Letters Update their RSS Feed . . . creatively
April 2, 2006 1:01 PM   Subscribe

This RSS feed has expired: Moving an RSS feed is always a bit of a chore - you need to make sure all of your subscribers are informed, have the new address, etc. Arts & Letters Daily, a staple of the intellectual elite, has hit upon an creative solution. Their previous feed (linked above) presents headlines that, in addition to being entirely in capital letters, aren't quite up to their usual quality. Examples inside.
posted by aladfar (12 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: doesn't make much sense



 
For example:

WITH GOD AS MY WITNESS I AM THE WORST POKEMON TRAINER EVER

I SURE AM COZY UNDER THESE BLANKETS!!! OH GOD A SPIDER *BONK* OW JESUS I THINK ELLEN SHOULD GET ALZHEIMER'S AND "COME OUT" IN EVERY EPISODE

It's really a brilliant solution. Due to the date, however, I initially thought it was an April Fool's prank.
posted by aladfar at 1:02 PM on April 2, 2006


um ok
posted by mr_crash_davis at 1:04 PM on April 2, 2006


Guess you had to be there.
posted by Galvatron at 1:09 PM on April 2, 2006


hmmm...
posted by quarsan at 1:10 PM on April 2, 2006


Metafilter : We really, really dig the minutia.
posted by crunchland at 1:10 PM on April 2, 2006


Huh. I thought it was really clever and interesting. And, well, MeFi worthy. Oh well.
posted by aladfar at 1:21 PM on April 2, 2006


Huh?
posted by fenriq at 1:23 PM on April 2, 2006


aladfar, I think the problem is that you didn't link to anything except a message explaining that the feed is expired. generally, you should link to SOMETHING. providing two headline examples in the first comment doesn't really fix the fact that your post links to nothing. If it's not possible to provide a link to something we can see and appreciate, then it's not for posting to MeFi.
posted by shmegegge at 1:35 PM on April 2, 2006


I am actually considering a similar problem, our RSS feed blew up to several thousand daily subscribers before i had a chance to run it through feed burner. Consequently tracking the apache log is really the only way i know how many people are pulling it down.

This method quite frankly sucks, i have thought about other alternatives. Perhaps embedding an iframe to a bogus page that just has a google analytics script in it. However, i'm not sure if this would violate the TOS of analytics, and would certainly not work on every reader.

Ahh well, it would be nice if in some future version of RSS they allowed javascript so that i could solve both problems at once.
posted by sourbrew at 1:37 PM on April 2, 2006


Ah ha! I thought I was linking directly to the RSS feed itself, thereby allowing everyone to scroll through the interesting headlines. I screwed up.

Delete! Delete!

It really was clever though.
posted by aladfar at 1:38 PM on April 2, 2006


I really hope they never allow javascript with RSS.
posted by Eamon at 1:39 PM on April 2, 2006


It's not even their RSS feed -- it's a third-party one, scraped from their site by a friend of mine. He discontinued his scraped one because Arts and Letters Daily now provides their own.
posted by mendel at 1:49 PM on April 2, 2006


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