What is RSS?

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication is a means for websites to publish details of when new stories or articles are posted. These feeds may be syndicated to other web sites, or read by users with feed reader software or RSS enabled browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer 7 or Safari.

TtH provides an RSS feed on most pages that contain a list of stories or challenges, as well as a feed for news stories.

Subscribing to RSS feeds

TtH publishes details of a page's feed in the HTML header. If your feed reader software integrates with your browser or your browser supports RSS natively, it should detect the feed automatically.

• In Firefox 1.5 and later, click the icon at the right hand end of the address bar
• In Opera 9.0, click the icon at the right hand end of the address bar
• In Internet Explorer 7 click the 'feeds' button to the right of the tabs.

You can also use internet based services to subscrbie to feeds

• If you have a Google Personalised Homepage, click on Add Stuff then click Add by URL, then type in the URL of the page on TtH containing the feed you wish to add or the direct URL of the RSS feed from the list below.
• If you have a Windows Live home page, click on Add Stuff then click on Advanced Options, then type either the page URL or the RSS feed URL into the 2nd text box and click the subscribe button next to it.
• If you have a My Yahoo Account, click on Add Content then click on Add RSS Feed by URL, then type in the RSS url from the list below containing the feed you wish to add. NOTE: Yahoo isn't quite as smart as Google or Microsoft, and you have to add the URL of the RSS feed itself, it does NOT accept the URL of the page containing the link to the feed.
• If you have a Live Journal account you can add a feed to your friends page as syndicated content. Click Find Feeds in the live journal menu, then enter the RSS URL from the list below into the search box. If you have a paid live journal account, you can add any feed. If you have a free account, then you can only add feeds that have already been added to live journal by a paying user. There are many TtH authors with paid accounts and if you ask nicely on the forums, I'm sure one of them will create a feed for you.

Other feed reader software may indicate the existance of a feed in a different way. If your feed reader does not automatically detect feeds, or you wish to syndicate the content to another web site, you may use the URLs listed below.

Feed URLs

If you wish to manually subscribe to feeds, you can use the following URLs:

• Latest stories: http://www.tthfanfic.org/rss.php
• Latest challenges: http://www.tthfanfic.org/rss.php?special=challenges
• Latest news articles: http://www.tthfanfic.org/rss.php?special=news
• Latest stories in a category: http://www.tthfanfic.org/rss.php?cat=<number>
• Latest stories in a sub-category: http://www.tthfanfic.org/rss.php?subcat=<number>
• Latest stories in a sub-sub-category: http://www.tthfanfic.org/rss.php?subsubcat=<number>
• Latest stories from an author: http://www.tthfanfic.org/rss.php?author=<number>
• Latest responses to a challenge: http://www.tthfanfic.org/rss.php?challenge=<number>
• Latest stories in a series: http://www.tthfanfic.org/rss.php?series=<number>
• All chapters in a story: http://www.tthfanfic.org/rss.php?story=<number>
• Latest updates to stories you are tracking: This URL is displayed on your "My Tracked Authors" tab in your profile.

You can see the "number" to use in the URL of the respective pages. Also, you may add &items=<number> onto the end of any of these URLs to limit the maximum number of items returned (up to 100). The default is 30, except for the feed of chapters in a story, which returns all chapters by default. The limit of 100 items does not apply to this feed.

Examples

To retreive the latest 30 harry potter stories: http://www.tthfanfic.org/rss.php?cat=5

To retreive the latest 10 CSI stories: http://www.tthfanfic.org/rss.php?subcat=87&items=10

To retreive the latest 5 responses to Jinni's "Woke up in vegas" challenge: http://www.tthfanfic.org/rss.php?challenge=310&items=5

To retreive the latest 20 stories from the whole site: http://www.tthfanfic.org/rss.php?items=20

Publishing Syndicated Content

We encourage you to include our feeds on other web sites - e.g. to list your stories archived here on your personal web site. However, we ask you to use a method of incorporating the feed that respects the "Time to Live" published within the feed. Also, in keeping with standards for web robots, please set a user agent string that identifies the URL of a page on your site that explains the purpose of your bot and your policies.

I.e. If the feed has a TTL of one hour, a second hit to your web site should use a cached copy of the feed if it occurs within one hour of the first. You should not use a method that means every single hit on your site results in a hit on our site to download the feed.

We may block the IP addresses of servers not respecting the time to live if they generate excessive traffic.

If your site uses PHP, we suggest using the open source magpierss to embed feeds.