New Feature! RSS Feed

Sam Pinansky

As suggested to me on a reddit post (and I had been intending to make this at some point), I've implemented an RSS feed for the front page events.

There's a link right there next to "Coming Up!" for you to import into your favorite RSS feed reader. (or use https://api.j-novel.club/rss )

Right now it lists the last 15 events that have already passed their release date.

Fezu

Thanks for adding this, this is great for those who use their favorite RSS services like Feedly and such!

LostOnTheLine

I'm using the RSS Feed for a few series that I'm interested in, but I am having some issues with parsing of the date...

The date seems to be formatted for Maybe America/New York time but is listed as UTC/GMT.

For the Ascendance Of A Bookworm RSS it lists the date as:
pubDate - Mon, 29 May 2023 15:30:45 +0000
isoDate - 2023-05-29T15:30:45.000Z

Both of these say that it is UTC (+0)
I am in America/Phoenix | MST | UTC-7
New parts come in at 2PM
When I format the date to my local time zone it says 8:30AM
formattedDate - Mon, May 29, 2023 @ 8:30 AM MST
When I don't it says 3:30PM
formattedDate - Mon, May 29, 2023 @ 3:30 PM UTC

I'm not exactly sure why it says "30" since it comes in on the hour, but I'd like to understand how the date for the Feed is given. If it's done by the time it is prepped internally I assume being 1:30 ahead is because it's prepped before so 2 hours difference sounds like the East Coast. But my options are to have it show the wrong time or a different wrong time & I don't understand why...

jpwong

@LostOnTheLine Hmm, that's interesting, I can't pull up the bookworm entry anymore since there's been more than 15 new releases now, but I took a look at Mythical Hero (first item on the list now) and it appears to be returning the correct GMT value of Tue, 30 May 2023 21:00:00 GMT

LostOnTheLine

@jpwong What do you mean you can't pull the Bookworm one?

https://labs.j-novel.club/feed/series/5c8df1ef2f5f17684dd287b6.rss

The most recent pull is:

title
Ascendance of a Bookworm: Part 5 Volume 5 Part 4
link
https://j-novel.club/read/ascendance-of-a-bookworm-part-5-volume-5-part-4
pubDate
Mon, 29 May 2023 15:30:45 +0000
enclosure

url
https://d2dq7ifhe7bu0f.cloudfront.net/Part-6474c52538f2134856b56bbe/bookworm5.5-cover-400.jpg
length
58478
type
image/jpeg
content
Read Ascendance of a Bookworm: Part 5 Volume 5 Part 4 (available for subscribers)
contentSnippet
Read Ascendance of a Bookworm: Part 5 Volume 5 Part 4 (available for subscribers)
guid
https://j-novel.club/read/ascendance-of-a-bookworm-part-5-volume-5-part-4
isoDate
2023-05-29T15:30:45.000Z

jpwong

@LostOnTheLine Obviously I used the only URL that was in the thread at the time, the one in the first post https://api.j-novel.club/rss which only returns the latest 15 entries for the release calendar. As far as I can deduce, the times listed in that feed are all accurate.

Looking at the actual series RSS feed which you've listed, I think what's probably happening is that the pubDate you're seeing in that feed is not the date at which the part was released to the public, but instead the date at which the part was uploaded to JNC's site. You'll notice that the times are all over the place even though they're for the most part all listing the same hour of the day. P5V4P7 and P8 are even listed with a date that's only 2 minutes apart from each other.

LostOnTheLine

@jpwong
I guess that makes some sense.
If that's the time it was uploaded then it makes sense, but it's weird that it gives us that date since the RSS Feed isn't be updated until the new part comes out.
I just discovered that my User Feed shows the correct time for the same item, as the date of the PrePub Part release. Then the Feed you were referencing shows the date as the official release date, but for some reason doesn't have a cover image.
I really wish that date was in the feed because I always have to go search to see when the actual release date is. The way it is the RSS Feed is useful for the PrePub stuff, but some of the stuff I follow I just want to know when it's out as I don't pre-order them so I can't read them, because I decided I don't want to, until then. Series like Smartphone, which I'll wait until it's at the library & Arifureta, which is annoying to read in parts where the story currently is & my friend reads & then I borrow his copy because I started that one as Physical books & have them on my bookshelf, so I buy the physical copy & don't have money enough to justify buying twice, I'd still like to know updates about it, but when the parts come out is annoying so I had to unfollow it & only have the Series RSS update once a month, but the RSS just lets me know that the volume is done & I have to go to the website to look it up or just guess that in some amount of weeks after it'll be available.

Don't get me wrong, I love that they have an RSS Feed at all, it's so much nicer than other places where you have to hack together a Webpage RSS.app to get updates, I just wish they at least showed the ReleaseDate on the RSS instead of just the Parts.
In a perfect world It'd be nice to have a separate RSS for the actual Releases, but if it was at least included it could be filtered by an If ReleaseDate is within 7 days of PubDate or something.

Anyway. Thanks for the help, at least I know that it's not something I can really fix, but the time given is, in all likelihood, just when it was uploaded or something like that, not a weird timezone problem.

jpwong

@LostOnTheLine Well, I mean for JNC it might well be a matter of just changing the return value on the series RSS feeds to correct the data. Hopefully one of the developers sees the thread and can maybe take a look into it, it could simply be that no one's noticed it's been returning the wrong value from the system all this time.

LostOnTheLine

@jpwong adding a value to an rss feed should be simple. That's one of the best things about an RSS Feed, you can have lots of values & it's still just a few KBs & unlike a Website where to look at it you have to look at all of it & scroll to get to what you want to see, an RSS lets you just subscribe to the parts you want so I can complete ignore the GUID, contentSnippet, & isoDate While others may want those & ignore the content, pubDate, & link, so adding extra values is easy with pretty much no negatives.

I did discover a weird issue with the Coming Soon RSS Feed...
I'm using n8n with a community-built add-on to have a RSS Feed Trigger that will ONLY get the data that is new each time it runs. (I know that's the default for most things but n8n's RSS Feed Reader only gets everything in the RSS each time it polls & you have to add filters & do a bunch of steps to just get new stuff). I have a bunch that I use the same template for, & have 1 for each of the Bookworm feeds (Bookworm, Royal Academy Stories, Short Stories Collection, Fanbooks, Manga) as well as a few others from here, some from other sources, some scraped together with RSS.app, etc. But for some reason this one seems to pull 15 "New" items each time it is updated, but it sends 15 copies of the same message with the newest entry... Which is weird because I can't figure out why it's doing that, & without knowing the why it's practically impossible to fix... When setting it up it will pull just the latest entry so you can set the variables & such, & it only returns 1 entry during that process, & it checks every hour but doesn't return anything until there's a new entry, so it's recognizing them as having been got already, but each time it gets something it gets 15 of them.
Oh, & I realized that the date it gives isn't the Release date unfortunately but just the time it is posted to the feed, I was confused because Bookworm was showing the Release Date, but it WAS the release date, I just didn't realize that.

Coming Soon to J-Novel Club:
Friend's Little Sister Vol 10
Official Release Date
Wed, May 31, 2023
@ 10:00 AM MST

15 times at 10AM MST

Coming Soon to J-Novel Club:
100th Time's the Charm Vol. 2
Official Release Date
Wed, May 31, 2023
@ 10:00 AM MST

15 times at 10AM MST

Coming Soon to J-Novel Club:
Reborn to Master the Blade: Volume 9
Official Release Date
Wed, May 31, 2023
@ 10:00 AM MST

15 times at 10AM MST

Coming Soon to J-Novel Club:
The Game Master Has Logged In to Another World: Vol. 3
Official Release Date
Wed, May 31, 2023
@ 10:00 AM MST

15 times at 10AM MST

Coming Soon to J-Novel Club:
Chillin' in Another World: Vol. 10
Official Release Date
Wed, May 31, 2023
@ 10:00 AM MST

15 times at 10AM MST

It doesn't do the rest because those ones aren't new with the next one having a pubDate 3 hours earlier.

I'm not sure how to fix that, but since it's not actually giving release dates & it's giving updates for all series when they have new parts... I think I'm going to ditch that feed. But if a Developer happens to see this they might want to take at look at how that RSS Feed is setup...
EDIT: I actually ended up doing a filter to only show me the books that have "Publish" in the content so once a new one is officially published I'll give an update about whether I get 1 notification or 15...

chocolatkey

This post is deleted!

chocolatkey

@LostOnTheLine @jpwong you make a good point, the pubDate was based on the created date instead of launch date. I've altered it now.

The feed library we use is a bit strange, it only uses some of the dates on some of the feeds (atom vs rss). Maybe I'll update that sometime, but for now RSS uses launch date, Atom uses modified and JSON feed has both

LostOnTheLine

@chocolatkey That's awesome. I noticed the ATOM feed was lacking since I initially used it because it's supposed to be more advanced, but the RSS gave better results than either the JSON or the ATOM so it's the one I've been using. JSON is nice but more than half of the programs I've tried (Including n8n & Automatisch, the ones I'm currently working with) just don't support it, or you have to go through a bunch of hoops to get it to work.

Thanks a bunch for updating it, it's nice to know not only that feedback is heard, but so quickly, & things are done to improve so fast

pcj

My Atom feed of my follows is now sorted by when you guys posted it to the queuing system rather then when it was released now, after whatever you changed. Threw me for a loop because it said there were 2 unread posts, and I didn't see anything, and had to scroll down to March to see the new Skull Dragon's Daughter

https://labs.j-novel.club/feed/user/{usertoken}.atom

pcj

@pcj said in New Feature! RSS Feed:

My Atom feed of my follows is now sorted by when you guys posted it to the queuing system rather then when it was released now, after whatever you changed. Threw me for a loop because it said there were 2 unread posts, and I didn't see anything, and had to scroll down to March to see the new Skull Dragon's Daughter

https://labs.j-novel.club/feed/user/{usertoken}.atom

Just pointing out this still hasn't been fixed. The items are showing up in the ATOM feed with the date the release was uploaded and not the date it got published (but they don't show up in the feed at all until it gets published). This means it suddenly says I have 2 unread items and I have to scroll down digging for it to find out what it was because they got uploaded a while ago.