I have created a basic "news feed" for this side of Hatrack River. It shows the titles (with links) of the top 25 threads on the forum. Here's the URL:
Now, if you go there in a normal browser its not going to look like much. Its not supposed to. RSS stands for many things, among them "Rich Site Summary" and "Really Simple Syndication". Its a way for a site that regularly posts news or other periodic content to make that content available in a condensed, content based format which is easily parsed and passed around by computers, and provides for humans a handy way of scanning for interesting information among the sea of content available. For some more in depth information, check here: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html
After downloading either news reader, just use its subscribe function to subscribe to the aforementioned URL
You may find it worthwhile to be able to keep an eye for a topic you like coming up without having to bring up hatrack entirely. Plus, the rss feed is cached, so while it will only get around a couple of minutes behind, no matter how many people view it during each refresh cycle hatrack's main page will only get hit once.
Try it out. See if it makes maintaining your hatcrack dosage easier. RSS is changing the way people gather information, and its growing at breakneck speed.
posted
Yeah, all fixed now. In well formed XML you can't use
code:
&
you have to use
code:
&
To solve it, I just used a different separator altogether (its for a dummy variable to cause rss readers to not get the items out of order).
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
This program isn't all that impressive. You could probably code it after a couple months of learning programming.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
I used a sax parser and had it first check if a tag was a link tag, then check if it had a substring which appears in links to topics. If it did, I stored the url and set a flag, which alerted the data handler to slurp the next data, and then I unflagged at the close of the first tag.
I'm aided because no html brackets are allowed in thread titles. edit: of course, html brackets are not allowed period that aren't part of a tag in any well formed html document. No tags are allowed in thread titles, either.
That was easy, really, it was much more complicated to take care of multipage threads (ended up doing it with a couple of re's), though mainly because I wanted it to be at least a bit "smart" about it.
posted
I doubt it since he doesn't use that website much if at all anymore. But I'm asking.
When I saw the thread I hoped Rhaegar was back. But I knew he was on an airplane, so my hope went away.
Posts: 5362 | Registered: Apr 2004
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