InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "A week's like a long time."

InsaneJournal syndication lets you automatically receive updates from a number of different websites and have them added to your InsaneJournal friends page. It is most often used for sites that update content in an article format, or that update on a regular basis, like a journal, a news site, or a comic.

InsaneJournal implements syndication by creating "Syndicated Accounts". These are updated when the account reads an RSS file from the host site and cannot be updated in any other way. InsaneJournal regularly reads the RSS file to determine whether it has been updated. (Note that InsaneJournal does not read directly from the site's homepage; the site must have an RSS feed.) If it has been updated, InsaneJournal will create new entries in the syndicated account corresponding to the new content in the file. The entries will then remain available on InsaneJournal for two weeks, after which they are deleted. For more information about syndicated accounts, see http://www.insanejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=123 .

If you add a syndicated account to your friends list, you will then see these new entries on your friends page. You can find further information on how to do so, and on how to create syndicated accounts, at http://www.insanejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=120 .

If you would like to try to find some Syndicated Accounts to add to your friends list to experience the Syndication system, please read http://www.insanejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=119 .

Note that InsaneJournal is not responsible for the external feed. If an external feed is discontinued or stops working then the syndicated account will stop receiving updates. More information about why a syndicated account may not work can be found at http://www.insanejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=122 .

Note also that InsaneJournal makes no claim to the content supplied through any syndicated accounts.

All accounts on InsaneJournal have an RSS feed, located at a URL of the form http://www.insanejournal.com/users/exampleusername/data/rss/ , where "exampleusername" is replaced by your username.

Only the 25 most recent entries are displayed on this RSS feed. Protected entries are visible if the user requesting the RSS feed is able to authenticate with InsaneJournal and has permission to see the entries. For example, if you view your RSS feed in your browser while logged in, you will see all your most recent entries in it. However, someone who is not logged in, or someone you do not list as a friend, would not be able to see any protected entries in the feed. For most RSS aggregators and newsreaders, this will mean that only public entries are included. This is because they generally do not provide any means of cookie authentication.

For Free Patient accounts, only the subject (when present), the first few words of the entry, and a link to the entry will be contained in the feed.

However, if you are a "Self-committed" [paid], Permanently Insane, or Early Inmate account holder, your feed will include the subject (when present), the full text of your entry, and a link to the entry (See http://www.insanejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=10 for more information on the benefits of Self-committed and Permanently Insane accounts).

The main syndication page [http://www.insanejournal.com/syn/] contains a list of the most popular syndicated accounts on InsaneJournal.

If you want to find a listing of more syndicated accounts, please visit [http://www.insanejournal.com/syn/list.bml].

You may also find [http://www.insanejournal.com/syn/raw.bml] useful. This is a plain-text list of all recently updated syndicated accounts.

The syn_promo community [http://www.insanejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=syn_promo] exists for the purpose of promoting syndicated accounts, and users are encouraged to use it to announce syndicated accounts that they create.

You can add existing syndicated accounts either in the normal manner (http://www.insanejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=16) or by visiting http://www.insanejournal.com/syn/ . This page lists the syndicated accounts that you are currently watching. From this page you can remove these accounts from your Friends list, or add new ones from the list of popular syndicated accounts shown immediately below.

If the feed you are interested in already exists as a syndicated account, but is not in the list of popular feeds, you can use the form at the bottom of the page to add it to your friends list. In this case, you can enter either the account name or the feed URL.

If you are creating a new syndicated account, you must enter both the desired account name and the correct URL of the site's RSS feed; you you cannot enter the URL of an HTML page on the site. You may be able to learn the URL of the RSS feed by contacting the webmaster or support service of the site. Free Patients cannot create new feeds.

Once you have created a new feed, it may take up to several days for posts to begin appearing. If you have added it to your friends list, there will typically be a large number of entries that appear at once on your Friends page. This is a one-time effect upon account creation.

Note that InsaneJournal is not responsible for the external feed. If an external feed is discontinued or stops working then the syndicated account will stop receiving updates. More information about why a syndicated account may not work can be found at http://www.insanejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=122 .

It is possible for Self-committed [paid], Permanently Insane, and Early Inmate account holders to add journals from certain other sites to their friends list by using InsaneJournal's syndication feature. More information about this can be found at [http://www.insanejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=139]. Additionally, if a syndicated account has already been created for an off-site journal, a Free Patient account holder can add it to their friends page, but they cannot create a syndicated account themself.

For journals that are on a LiveJournal-code based site using a recent version of the LiveJournal server code, each user's RSS feed is located at a URL of the following form:

http://www.insanejournal.com/users/exampleusername/data/rss/

Replace "www.insanejournal.com" in the example URL with the URL of the actual LiveJournal-code based site, and "exampleusername" with the user whose journal you want to watch.

Viewing a syndicated form of a journal in this manner will only allow you to view the user's public entries, even if the user also watches your RSS feed, because you cannot add each other as friends in the way that you can add other users on the same site. On your friends page, rather than seeing the entries normally, you may only see the subject or first few words of each entry and a link to the entry. Any comments that you leave on the entry through InsaneJournal will only appear to users viewing the entry through InsaneJournal. As such it is recommended that you visit the other journal site to make any comments.

The most common reason why a syndicated account will not update is that there is some sort of problem with the RSS feed that it is syndicating from.

-- The site must be a valid RSS feed. A normal HTML page will not work.

-- The feed must contain valid RSS. You can check that the feed's code is valid by using an RSS validator. One can usually be found by performing a query for "RSS validator" on your favorite search engine.

If no updates are appearing, it is also possible that the feed itself is not updating, even if it contains valid RSS and even if the site that it is syndicating from is updating. If you are sure that the site is updating, then you should contact the maintainer of the website being syndicated to correct any invalid RSS feed problems.

Once a syndicated account has been created, nobody owns it. Nobody can log into it, make comments from it, or make entries to it in the conventional way. The only way that a syndicated account can be updated is from reading an updated RSS feed.

If the feed URL for a syndicated account that you watch changes, causing the syndicated account to stop functioning, then it is possible for the feed URL to be changed. To have this done, please submit a request under the Syndication category at http://www.insanejournal.com/support/submit.bml , stating the username of the account, and the desired feed URL. Note that it may take a few days for the change to be made. Please do not create a new account with the desired feed URL, as this will make the change impossible.

Other than this, it is not currently possible to modify any information about a syndicated account. Syndicated accounts cannot be deleted.

If your site does not offer an RSS feed, and it is being "screenscraped" and syndicated onto InsaneJournal, please follow the instructions in http://www.insanejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=18 to contact the Abuse team.

If your site offers an RSS feed, but you do not want that feed syndicated onto InsaneJournal, you can block InsaneJournal's IP (74.208.15.149) from accessing your server.