RSS?

questions, corrections, complaints, suggestions

Postby pryds » Wed Jun 21, 2006 10:50 pm

Would it be possible to have the new posts in this forum served as an RSS stream? I like web forums like this one, but unfortunately I have a habit of forgetting to check up on them from time to time. If new posts from web forums are delivered directly into my mail/rss program, I find that I am much more likely to actually follow the discussions. Perhaps others feel the same way, too?
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Postby Sander » Thu Jun 22, 2006 11:21 am

There are two main RSS feeds:

- Most recently active topics
- Newest topics

It seems that they've forgotten to add links to them by default. If you want to exclude the "About this forum" category, you can add "&nfid=2" to the URL.

For people who do not know what RSS is: it is a way to keep up-to-date with websites. If you add an RSS feed from a website to your RSS program, you get notified when there is new content. If your web browser supports RSS (Firefox, Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer 7 do), click the Image button.
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Postby pryds » Sun Jul 02, 2006 2:58 pm

Ah, nice indeed! Thanks!
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Postby pryds » Sat Jul 22, 2006 6:04 pm

Hmm... I notice that the RSS stream gives only an item per new tread/topic. Would it be possible to get an item for each new post made to any thread, and then actually put the message text in the RSS item?
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Postby Ole Damgaard » Sun Jul 23, 2006 5:09 pm

pryds wrote:Would it be possible to get an item for each new post made to any thread, and then actually put the message text in the RSS item?

You and I know that it's possible... :-)
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Postby Sander » Tue Jul 25, 2006 6:26 pm

That sounds useful indeed. The next version of PunBB will have these topic feeds (see this thread for more upcoming features). Nobody knows when that will be ready though, so maybe it's a good idea to look for a mod (via the PunBB.org Forums or PunBB Resource). I'll see what I can do. Any help searching for the right mod is welcome.
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Postby pryds » Wed Jul 26, 2006 11:17 pm

Ole Damgaard wrote:You and I know that it's possible... :-)

Yup! :)

Sander wrote:That sounds useful indeed. The next version of PunBB will have these topic feeds (see this thread for more upcoming features). Nobody knows when that will be ready though, so maybe it's a good idea to look for a mod (via the PunBB.org Forums or PunBB Resource). I'll see what I can do. Any help searching for the right mod is welcome.

Actually (and as Ole hinted), I made such a hack for the forum at ddfr.dk since such a functionality didn't seem to exist in PunBB per default. I can send it to you if you want. It might not work with this forum right out of the box (or perhaps it does?), but with a slight tweeking, you should be able to get it up and running.
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Postby Sander » Thu Jul 27, 2006 2:27 pm

pryds wrote:Actually (and as Ole hinted), I made such a hack for the forum at ddfr.dk since such a functionality didn't seem to exist in PunBB per default. I can send it to you if you want.

Would be nice! You can find my email address in my profile.
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Postby Sander » Sat Jul 29, 2006 6:51 pm

Thanks for the mail! I see it requires some modification and I'm afraid I can't do that before my vacation (leaving Monday and have to do some other things first). So expect the feed in a few weeks.
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Postby pryds » Sat Jul 29, 2006 8:17 pm

Perhaps I should tell what RSS is, in case some people wonder.

If your email program or web browser has RSS support, you can subscribe to an RSS stream (which only involves adding a web address somewhere in your program). This RSS stream at all times contains for instance the 20 most recent posts to a web forum, the 50 most recent news articles of an online newspaper, or similar. Your software will consult the stream repeatedly with givent intervals to check for new items.

How the RSS items (e.g. forum posts) are displayed depends on your software. I use my email software (Thunderbird) for RSS, and hence they pop in to a special RSS inbox as if they were emails. I can't answer them directly, though, that still requires me to go to the website, but each RSS item contains a link to the relevant webpage, so it's just one click away.

I know that the web browser Firefox also supports RSS. Here the RSS items appear as extra bookmarks (that would be "Favourites" in Internet Explorer) which are automatically updated (Firefox calls them "Live bookmarks" for that reason).

As far as I know, the next version of Internet Explorer will also (finally) support RSS and similar technologies (e.g. "Atom"), but I don't know how they will be handled. The Opera web browser also supports RSS. And at last I should say that you can also get specific RSS programs that will do various things to an RSS stream (e.g. flash news headlines on your desktop, or similar). These programs are called "RSS aggregators" or "RSS readers". Here are a few screenshots:

Image
RSS in Firefox

Image
RSS in Thunderbird

Image
RSS in FeedReader

Image
RSS in SharpReader
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