RSS / Atomto follow people publications

Hi,

I would love being able to follow the last notebooks of someone on Observable. One possibility would be to publish a RSS/Atom file for every user page. Other would be more advanced: an option to follow someone, and then a tab in my account to see all the last posts, with also RSS/Atom on this page.

3 Likes

Sure, that’d be great! We’ll probably first implement being able to follow specific people with push notifications, because, alas so many people have abandoned Atom/RSS :confused: but this would be a great follow-up.

2 Likes

Do you have actual data to support this? I don’t, but it seems to me that things might be changing (e.g this article). Atom/RSS are great standards that give users control of their own information consumption. The design pattern of push notifications is flawed and is arguably damaging to users’ well-being in many cases. I love Observable but I would love it even more if you guys took an informed stance on issues like this one.

@sorig, please be patient. We’re planning on supporting Atom/RSS, and we’ll ship it as soon as it’s ready.

2 Likes

Great, thanks Mike! I was just worried that it was far down your priority list compared to push notifications.

RSS feeds for authors are live! You should be able to paste a profile URL into your preferred feed reader to subscribe. For example, my profile is:

https://beta.observablehq.com/@mbostock

And my RSS feed is:

https://api.observablehq.com/documents/@mbostock.rss

7 Likes

Thank you very much. Good work, you are too fast!

1 Like

Would it be possible to add collection RSS feeds too? I’d like to be able to follow the latest notebooks added to a couple of collections.

2 Likes

RSS for collections is now live. Thank you for the suggestion! Here is an example feed:

https://api.observablehq.com/collection/@d3/d3-array.rss

4 Likes

Thank you so much!

2 Likes

This is great! I was just thinking this was a feature I wanted.

Is it discoverable? With my old (but usually trustable) Reeder, it doesn’t look like it gets the feed’s url from profile nor collection. Inspecting the source doesn’t show the usual <link…> either.

37

Dynamically added, it seems:

The link is updated, so adding RSS from user profiles should work again. We server-render the pages for anonymous visitors only, so if you open developer tools on a logged-in page, you won’t see the SSR result.

Any chance you might allow cross origin requests for .rss paths, for some sweet, sweet, notebook based syndication? :smiley:

1 Like

Just curious what folks are using for an RSS reader. Haven’t used one before but looking for something simple that would notify me when an author I follow publishes something. Cheers.

It would be really awesome if there was an alert system similar to here (talk.observablehq.com) with notifications under our profile icon… where you would see a list of recent notebooks by authors you follow.

2 Likes

I’m using Feedly but it doesn’t do push notifications. The Newsify app does, though.

2 Likes

I’d like to bump this. Is anonymous CORS for these resources something you’d be willing to implement?