RSS on AnthroSource

I’m not sure if anyone’s mentioned this, but in June AnthroSource added RSS feeds to each of their journals, piping tables of contents to you when each new journal comes out. This seems pretty neat, although the feeds are wacky — each post includes the title and the bibliographic details (a handful include snippets from the front of the article, though I can’t figure out why those rare few are selected for special treatment). This could be useful to some folks, I suppose, but… If your reader is set up to open the page directly, though, it becomes more useful — you go to the citation page in AnthroSource, where there’s an abstract if available and links to the PDF or into JStor. A bit kludgy — here’s what it looks like for me: FeedReader displays feed, I select post, Feedreader displays post I click headline, FeedReader displays citation page, I click PDF link, FeedReader opens login page in Opera, I log in, pdf opens in Opera. The feed I tested doesn’t link to J-Stor, but you can guess for yourself what extra steps that would take.

I’d like to see full-text, or at least full abstracts, in the feed itself, along with a deep link to the PDF. That would be useful. It can’t be all that hard to add validation to the feeds — my RSS reader allows me to add a username and password, so it must be possible within the standard. I’d also like to see RSS-ized searches — that would be awesome! (For that matter, I’d like to see Google add RSS to searches outside of their blogsearch ghetto — I guess that’s a bit off-topic, but in case they’re reading this….) AnthroSource isn’t serving up ads, so they have no interest in keeping me (or you) coming back to their site — the site should be a framework for serving up information (on demand, just in time… where have I heard this before?).

I kvetch ’cause I love, though — RSS is a good step for AnthroSource.

2 thoughts on “RSS on AnthroSource

  1. Sorry then, my bad. I did search for “RSS” before posting this — I was surprised I didn’t find anything.

    What this means, then, is that this post is *all about ME!* WHat I like, what I don’t like, and — if you read between the lines — exactly how harried I’v been since May.

    Who woulda thunk it?

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