Sim - RSS Feed?
- Thread starter duncan_m
- Start date
Sim
Administrator
Actually, vBulletin v3 can do RSS, however there are some huge limitations with the current functionality.
- It's done for the whole site, so on a busy site like this you are going to get a LOT of updates
- There is no way at the moment (without hacking) of getting a feed from an individual forum or thread (that would be really nice !)
- It just gives you an "excerpt" of the posts and not the entire posts
- It does not maintain any type of hierarchy or any indications of which posts belong to which threads
That being said, I do have the RSS syndication feature turned on already !!
http://www.somersoft.com/forums/external.php?type=RSS2
- It's done for the whole site, so on a busy site like this you are going to get a LOT of updates
- There is no way at the moment (without hacking) of getting a feed from an individual forum or thread (that would be really nice !)
- It just gives you an "excerpt" of the posts and not the entire posts
- It does not maintain any type of hierarchy or any indications of which posts belong to which threads
That being said, I do have the RSS syndication feature turned on already !!
http://www.somersoft.com/forums/external.php?type=RSS2
Sim
Administrator
I have discussed this previously on the forum (a while back now), but you can read about it in xml.com's What is RSS ?.
RSS is a great technology for information gathering and management via a subscription service. Typically you would subscribe to a news service (or forum, or blog, or product update etc) via email and the server or service would send you updates ("push" updates to you) to your email inbox. The problem is that you then need to wade through the spam in your inbox to find the useful information (the subscription update emails).
RSS changes the metaphor from a "push" to a "pull" - you use an RSS aggregator (I use FeedDemon, but there are plenty of other free tools and web based aggregators out there), which you set up to read an RSS feed and it periodically "pulls" the information from the site and stores it for you to read at your own leisure.
Using RSS and FeedDemon, I currently keep track of several discussion forums (not Somersoft !), quite a few blogs, plus a variety of news services, as well as product update information from numerous sites.
It's a simple but quite revolutionary technology.
RSS is a great technology for information gathering and management via a subscription service. Typically you would subscribe to a news service (or forum, or blog, or product update etc) via email and the server or service would send you updates ("push" updates to you) to your email inbox. The problem is that you then need to wade through the spam in your inbox to find the useful information (the subscription update emails).
RSS changes the metaphor from a "push" to a "pull" - you use an RSS aggregator (I use FeedDemon, but there are plenty of other free tools and web based aggregators out there), which you set up to read an RSS feed and it periodically "pulls" the information from the site and stores it for you to read at your own leisure.
Using RSS and FeedDemon, I currently keep track of several discussion forums (not Somersoft !), quite a few blogs, plus a variety of news services, as well as product update information from numerous sites.
It's a simple but quite revolutionary technology.
Sim
Administrator
I've attached some screenshots of FeedDemon viewing several news feeds - one is a syndication of Dilbert comic strips, another is a view of the Somersoft forum's RSS feed, and a third is showing a newspaper view which collects all the news into a single multi-column page so you can browse through it newspaper-style.
The interface is a little cluttered at low resolution - works best if you have a lot of screen realestate.
This is just one way to do it - there are hundreds of other tools out there, including web based tools to aggregate this type of information together for you.
The interface is a little cluttered at low resolution - works best if you have a lot of screen realestate.
This is just one way to do it - there are hundreds of other tools out there, including web based tools to aggregate this type of information together for you.
Attachments
Sim said:
Thats a pretty looking tool! I use Feed Reader
But I've just downloaded Feed Demon for a look see.
