RSS for serialized content
Want to read Cory Doctorow’s new book, Someone comes to Town, Someone leaves Town, via RSS?
This chicklet will let you do just that…doesn’t matter when you first subscribe, this feed will deliver the book to your feed reader in the right order, a couple of chapters a day, over the next month. You could even subscribe via WINKsite and get it all on your mobile phone…
[If you're reading this in a feed reader you'll have to visit the site to see this javascript generated link]
I am not convinced that novels are the ideal use for this sort of scheduled RSS delivery mechanism (who’s to say how fast or slowly you’d like to read the novel), but I am sure there are useful applications for this approach, perhaps delivering training materials and the like.
Anyway, do let me know what you think or if you have any issues with it.
UPDATE: I’ve had a few questions about what’s behind this feed…so if you’re interested, it is hosted by FeedHoster.
And I’ll wait a few days before giving out actual numbers, but at this time the feed is pushing 400 600 subscribers. Nice.
UPDATE 2: I should also mention that this individualized RSS concept is not new. Russell Beattie was thinking about it ages ago and had a brilliant implementation in Mobdex. It is a crime that Mobdex didn’t take off.
UPDATE: You can also subscribe to Cory’s older novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, via serial RSS feed over here.
This is such a cool reminx of my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town — an RSS feed that gives you a couple pages every day. No matter when you subscribe to it, it sends you the book starting from the beginning. Subscribe via Winksite and …
This is such a cool reminx of my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town — an RSS feed that gives you a couple pages every day. No matter when you subscribe to it, it sends you the book…
This is such a cool reminx of my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town — an RSS feed that gives you a couple pages every day. No matter when you subscribe to it, it sends you the book…
What if I want to use the RSS feature of Firefox?
Check out podiobooks.com. They have RSS feeds of a growing range of books. You choose how often you receive new chapters.
This is exactly the rss functionality I’ve been looking to implement on my site. I’ve wanted to allow folks to subscribe to comics, without being locked into a real time RSS feed. I can’t find an email link, but I would love it if you could impart some help to me. (Feel free to delete this comment, since it’s not, y’know, cogent…)
Hey Adam,
Unfortunately the javascript used to generate the unique URIs for each subscriber screws with the autodiscovery of the RSS feed.
If your preferred RSS reader is not listed in the mouse over list then just click the button and subscribe to the feed presented.
Hey, if there’s anyone out there with a paid LJ account, that wouldn’t mind setting up this feed there, that would be great! I think then, that we need a link to put in, once the feed is set up.
Hi Peggy,
Not sure what you mean by this. Can you exptrapolate?
Charles
I tried using this with my yahoo and it doesn’t work, I subscribed to it yesterday and today it shows links to chapters 1-5 that don’t go anywhere
Hey Jen, the item links don’t go anywhere because the content is in the feed itself, ie. it is meant to be read in your feed reader itself. I guess MyYahoo! is really designed for syndicating news headlines and doesn’t really lend itself to syndicating full content feeds like this, particularly where the the item content is pretty large in most cases.
Sorry about this. You might consider using a dedicated online aggregator like Bloglines.
I just finished it, and really enjoyed it. However, I did find a problem with the RSS method for delivering this particular book.
By its nature, the book jumps forwards and backwards in time, usually when going from one chapter to the next. I found myself several times trying to figure out if I missed a day in the feed, as I could not connect the current chapter to the one I read the previous day. This was particularly bad the first time that the jumps happened.
Perhaps including the first sentence of the next chapter at the end of each day’s chapter would alleviate this problem.
Anyway, thanks for a great book and a great delivery method.
This is a wonderful way to read a book, and the story line is great.
Keep up the great writing.
Love the idea, and the feed works well in my RSS – supporting -browser (Safari), but Winksite doesn’t want to publish it…says it can’t be validated for some reason. Any thoughts?
Hi,
We have just launched a new “serialised” RSS feed mechanism that is open to all to use – http://www.feedcycle.com
Thanks. Alex