RSS on favorites

November 19, 2010 3:28 PM

Is there a way to create an RSS feed from my favorites?
posted by bru to Feature Requests at 3:28 PM (20 comments total)

You mean like this

http://www.metafilter.com/favorites/292/posts/rss

or something else? I guess we do it for posts and not for comments.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 3:29 PM on November 19, 2010

Yeah, jessamyn has it. Click on the Favorites link at the top of any page and look for the "Subscribe" link near the headline. That's your favorites feed.
posted by pb (staff) at 3:31 PM on November 19, 2010

Here is mine if anyone is interested.
posted by special-k at 3:50 PM on November 19, 2010 [3 favorites]

Thanks jessamyn, pb, for the fast answers.

My bad, not clear enough: it works for "favorites posts", not for "favorites comments".
posted by bru at 4:08 PM on November 19, 2010

Any reason not to do favorite comments? Now that we've had the feature around for a few years, I think being able to track your favorites on other systems could be useful.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 4:45 PM on November 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

...it works for "favorites posts", not for "favorites comments".

Yeah, that's a conscious decision. Comments rely pretty heavily on context—much more than posts, which stand on their own much better. Feeds are explicitly about taking something offsite, and we haven't been very comfortable with the idea of individual MetaFilter comments on a website somewhere completely out of context. (The one exception I can think of is the Popular Comments feed.)

There are probably some great uses for posting MeFi comments somewhere else, but we haven't ever found that great case to outweigh not-so-great uses like hassling members offsite. I think we're pretty open-minded about it, though. So if there's a use-case for having these, maybe we could revisit it.
posted by pb (staff) at 4:49 PM on November 19, 2010

or yeah, what mathowie said.
posted by pb (staff) at 4:50 PM on November 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

I had completely forgotten about the popular favourites view. Thanks for reminding me, it's great!
posted by shelleycat at 5:24 PM on November 19, 2010

I mark as "favorite" mainly posts and comments about moderation and community governance. As of today, I have 188 favorite posts and 1168 favorite comments: moderation topics show up more often in comments than in posts.

So when a friend recently asked me how to better understand community moderation, I told her to just take the feed of my favorite comments on MetaFilter. She couldn't. And I tried and couldn't either. I thought I was doing something wrong.

So my question was more "does this feature exist?" than a "feature request". As quoted in my profile, I know that I am "using existing software functionality to solve a different problem than the one for which it was designed": I am not asking anything for such a marginal use.

And thank you very much. When it comes to customer service, people are always citing Zappos or Craig Newmark, but you beat them all by a mile.
posted by bru at 5:52 PM on November 19, 2010

my vote would be for keeping comments out of it or, better yet, making it easy to keep them out of it if one should so choose.
posted by philip-random at 7:53 PM on November 19, 2010

Heh. I asked Josh about this in an IM a while ago, and he said that it was an interesting idea but that there was no way to do it yet. Dunno if this feature's been around a while, if he didn't know about it, or if he didn't want me to know.
posted by klangklangston at 7:57 PM on November 19, 2010

Ah now I'm remembering the long conversation about whether having people's favorited comments queueing up outside of the site, devoid of context, was possibly a bad thing. I know that you, bru, have favorited things almost as a method of curation but I think for a lot of other people there's more randomness to it and having someone else be able to track someone's favorites as a way of generally being disagreeable about the content of their favorites queue was, at one point, something we were concerned about. Don't know if it merits a second look but now I remember the conversation.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:14 PM on November 19, 2010

The popular favorites tab is all kinds of nifty. It’s like MetaFilterFilter. But how come the inline youtube player links are yellow there instead of blue (when viewed on the professional white background)? These kind of tiny discrepancies make me uneasy.

Also, I would like an alternative “Popular Favourites” tab which is exclusively for people who spell favourite that way and only counts favourites given by UK-based members. Maybe this could run as an entirely separate parallel system alongside the existing one. Every post would have two buttons – “Add to favorites” and “Add to favourites.”

That is my idea.
Thank you.
Bye.
posted by him at 5:13 AM on November 20, 2010

him, there is a greasemonkey script you can install which will change the spelling of favorite to favourite if you'd prefer that.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 7:52 AM on November 20, 2010

Those icons should be blue now, him. Thanks for the heads up.
posted by pb (staff) at 8:55 AM on November 20, 2010

Thanks! You guys really do think of everything.
posted by him at 9:41 AM on November 20, 2010

I can't believe that greasemonkey script has been installed 68 times. I think I'll modify it and make a strict Liverpudlian version.

replacements = {
"pardon?": "Yer wha?",
"I agree": "is right, la!",
"cigarettes": "bifters",
"give": "giz",
"happy": "made up",
"interrupt": "geg in",
"fake": "jarg",
"sneakers": "trabs",
"jessamyn": "me Ma"
};
posted by PeterMcDermott at 10:15 AM on November 20, 2010 [4 favorites]

exclusively for people who spell favourite that way and only counts favourites given by UK-based members.

I'm not UK-based :-P
posted by shelleycat at 11:44 AM on November 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

Another RSS request, I found a while ago something created in Yahoo Pipes that made a RSS feed out of Youtube videos from FPPs and I wanted to create something that would make an RSS feed for any Youtube video posted in any thread. It seemed like there must be a way to do it, but I didn't really delve very deeply into how it could be done.
posted by jefeweiss at 7:09 PM on November 20, 2010

I can't believe that greasemonkey script has been installed 68 times. I think I'll modify it and make a strict Liverpudlian version.

and I have put it to use. proof!
posted by special-k at 8:06 PM on November 20, 2010 [1 favorite]