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RSS feeds and newsreaders

Tom Coates

11:40 / 08.08.02

Just in case anyone is even vaguely interested, you can now get a feed of Barbelith discussion topics to your newsreader...

URLs of the style:

http://www.barbelith.com/underground/rss.php?forum=4,5,7,9&create=1

where you can put in as many or as few fora as you like. If you leave off &create=1 then it'll provide you with a feed of threads that were last posted to rather than started...

Here are some good selections of fora:

All the revolution (philosophy, current affairs, science and mysticism) fora:
http://www.barbelith.com/underground/rss.php?forum=4,5,6,7&create=1

All the spectacle fora: (art & design, books, comics, films & tv, music)
http://www.barbelith.com/underground/rss.php?forum=8,9,10,11,12&create=1

Tremendous thanks to cal again for developing this...

Ellis says:

14:27 / 08.08.02

Silly (maybe) question (and I hope I'm not the only one who is wondering): What's a newsreader?

Tom Coates

16:29 / 08.08.02

If you're on a Mac running OSX - try downloading NetNewsWire - basically it's like having something that goes and gets all the new stuff off sites for you and puts it in one place - like it was e-mail or something. There are PC equivalents too...

Fist Fun

17:47 / 08.08.02

Coolio. I use Hotsheet. It is written in java so it is cross platform. I see why the topic summary is so important now.
One thing. Other RSS feeds have a little icon to represent the site. It seems Barbelith doesn't have one. Might be fun to design and add one.

Bear

13:07 / 09.08.02

I think this is a brilliant idea! And if I wasn't at work I would probably use it, just a little worried what might appear when I was on a smoke break - top marks though!

Tom Coates

09:28 / 15.12.02

I think Amphetadesk works quite well on the PC...

sleazenation

10:55 / 15.12.02

is there some equivilent of netnewswire for OS9?

Rollo Kim, on location

15:38 / 15.12.02

Having recently discovered the joys of OSX... I say yay!

OS 9, not sure if this is the right app but = http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/

w1rebaby

19:30 / 15.12.02

If you own Trillian 1.0 (i.e. the paid version, which is well worth the money, not so much for the added features but just to support those sound people) then you can download a newsreader plugin that gives you the headlines from the Trillian website, members' section.

I've put Barbelith into it as a custom feed, though I've not had the chance to try it out yet as nobody appears to have posted a new thread.

Smoothly

22:17 / 23.03.05

I'm a bit embarrassed to ask, but can anyone give me or suggest an introduction to RSS feeds, and specifically, what readers are de rigueur these days. I'm a non-blogging PC user and although arguably computer-literate, I'm certainly not computer-literary, so don't hesitate to talk down to me.

sleazenation

07:10 / 24.03.05

I'm using netnewswire lite 'cos its free

Tom Coates

10:10 / 24.03.05

Basically RSS feeds and newsreaders work like this.

You get an application like NetNewsWire or Amphetadesk, you 'subscribe' to a URL - like the ones above - and then every half-hour or so, your application goes off to the internet, sees if anything has changed, and if it has it brings it downloads either a taster or the full article for you to browse through at your convenience via your Application. It's a really cool way to keep up to date with sites you like to visit.

Smoothly

10:43 / 24.03.05

Thanks. I've only become (dimly) aware of RSS recently, and it was shaming to see how old this thread was. Can anyone recommend a PC (XP) compatible reader? Preferably one that's free, or at least free to try. Pluck?

Smoothly

12:14 / 24.03.05

Ah! I see Amphetadesk has a Window 98 and up version. Cheers Tom.

Grey Area

17:35 / 25.03.05

OK, so I plugged the RSS URL into Thunderbird and now I've got 10 new messages that all have (no subject) and are blank. Is this normal? Or have I putzed up the setup?

Grey Area

17:41 / 25.03.05

Actually, modify that query: Is there any way I can get Thunderbird to show me something in the subject line? I've figured out why it wasn't displaying pages, but now I'd really like to have an idea of where the new items are at, fora and thread-wise.

nedrichards is confused

12:35 / 29.03.05

Good work on this Tom and Cal fulmilled something I'd been meaning to ask for for ages without getting around to it. Nice one.

All Acting Regiment

19:13 / 08.12.05

Can I get this to work as a live bookmark in firefox?

Mirror

15:09 / 09.12.05

I have the same results in Thunderbird - the subject lines are all blank. I think that this may be because Thunderbird is looking for a different tag than for the subject content.

Also, I posted this in the other RSS thread, but is it possible for the referred URL to point to the most recently updated (i.e., the last) page of the thread in question, instead of the first? Making it the first page means that I have to open the page in a browser window instead of being able to read the recent additions directly from the newsreader.

Saltation

16:22 / 16.02.06

>is there some equivilent of netnewswire for OS9?

a slightly better approach is to use the web-based browser rss readers, which not only mean they run on ALL OSs but also lets you effortlessly swap b/w computers, say home & work. my favourite is the mis-named bloglines.com

you can see an example of what it looks like setup & in use here

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