ShelfReferential

The My Shelves page now shows recent activity on your friends’ shelves. The included activity is: adding/deleting/changing a shelf, adding/deleting/changing an item, having a wishlist item claimed, and being friended or unfriended.

This information is also available as an RSS feed, so you can track activity in your favorite aggregator. I use Google Reader.

RSS feeds are by their (current) nature public URLs, so I have taken some measures to prevent the accidental release of private information via the RSS feeds, all of which parallel what Facebook offers. First, the feed is marked “deny” using the Bloglines access control standard. This prevents aggregators from offering these feeds as suggestions to other users. Second, I have protected the feeds from web crawlers in the site’s robots.txt file. Third, each user may opt out of having their activity included in any RSS feeds. This is done from the My Account page. Opting out guarantees that none of your activity that was intended for your friends can escape the site via RSS. These are compromises, since the ideal case would be having the feed authenticated by the user for whom it is intended, but none of the aggregators support such a concept. When they do, I’ll support it.

This feature makes the site much more social and fun, since now you can find out what’s going on in one place. Enjoy!