RSS feed?

[wabmester]

Does this forum have an RSS feed available? I'd like to experiment with a content aggregator to see if I can reduce my "channel surfing" a bit.

[BigMoneyJim]

Yes, I posted a couple of RSS links a while back.

An example of those RSS feeds syndicated on a website:

Early Retirement Forum Recent Topics
Early Retirement Forum Recent Posts

Nifty stuff. early-retirement.org syndicated.

EDIT April 12, 2006: Changed link to my newer site that grabs the feed every hour or two and remembers the older articles. Modified intro and commentary slightly.

EDIT April 12, 2006, again: I built some more feed URLs today and now advertise them in the HTML headers:

Topics
http://early-retirement.org/forums/i...=news;limit=10

Posts
http://early-retirement.org/forums/i...ecent;limit=10

Forum Admin
http://early-retirement.org/forums/i...ecent;limit=10

Hi, I am...
http://early-retirement.org/forums/i...ecent;limit=10

FIRE and Money
http://early-retirement.org/forums/i...ecent;limit=10

Life after FIRE
http://early-retirement.org/forums/i...ecent;limit=10

Young Dreamers
http://early-retirement.org/forums/i...ecent;limit=10

Other Topics
http://early-retirement.org/forums/i...ecent;limit=10

[wabmester]

Cool. I added an RSS feed to MyYahoo and took the link directly to this topic. The web is getting better.

[dex]

What do you do to add this to Yahoo?

I found this site with a RSS Feedreader.
Any good?

http://www.feedreader.com/

Thanks

[wabmester]

Originally Posted by dex

What do you do to add this to Yahoo?

You can add the feed to myYahoo by clicking "+Add Content", then click "Add RSS by URL" and enter one of the RSS URLs that BMJ gave. If you use the 10-item list, you'll have to click "Edit" after you add the content to see the extra lines. myYahoo also lets you add new pages, so you can have a "Forums" page, for example.

If you're running FireFox, you can also add the feed directly to your browser. Or if you have a website, you can add it to your blog, etc. I haven't tried the stand-alone reader.

This is something that I've never heard of. - Can someone give me a short explaination of what RSS Feed is and how I would use it?


Or a link to a site that explains it?

Thanks

[wabmester]

Wikipedia is your friend:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(protocol)

[BigMoneyJim]

Quick explanation: It's a protocol for delivering "news feeds". It is currently used to notify or summarize new news stories, new blog articles or in this case new forum messages to another websites or a user's RSS reader for syndication to other websites or aggregation for a user.

The RSS links I've listed will provide the 10 most recent posts or the 5 most recent topics/threads, but even though the URL looks like a web address the format is XML/RSS so only an RSS-aware program can do anything useful with them.

I think most news, magazine and blog sites have RSS feeds available now. Look for small print about RSS, syndication or "news feeds". Several non-Microsoft web browsers have RSS reader support, and there are standalone programs. Web portals like Yahoo! can be configured to aggregate stories for you via RSS similar to the way the link to my site above does.

The protocol is more of a data format than a layout format meaning there is no common user interface, so the way you use it varies more widely than say WWW surfing.

The RSS data feed from Early Retirement Forums is a feature of this forum software we switched to in May this year.

Some additional babbling: Do you recall the program Pointcast or the Active Desktop Channels in Windows95? RSS is somewhat similar but is a "pull" content delivery mechanism rather than "push" like the predecessors I mention. This means instead of having info shoved at you after installing Pointcast or Active Desktop Channels RSS only gives you info when you request it. AvantGo is another example, although I'm not sure if you'd call that push or pull delivery.

One last babble: The RSS-provided content is not necessarily limited in size but is frequently limited in size, so you may only see the first part of a post/article/etc., but there is always a link directly to the article on the publishing site for further reading. The length limit is configurable on this board software, but I don't recall what it's set to.

[dex]

I thought Pointcast was great. It was a "push" info program. You could choose the info you wanted, download it and read off line.