Does my RSS look big in this?
By DOK
July 1 2013
Do you even know what RSS is? NO? Well pat yourself on the back; you're up there with most of the world!
Q. What does RSS stand for?
Who cares? You don't need to know what TCP/IP stands for in order to use the internet. Just think of it as a piece of internet magic! If you really need to know, Google is your friend here.
Q. OK, what does this bit of magic do?
Instead of you going to a website like ComeAllWithin to see if there are any new/changed posts, RSS does this for you. At timed intervals it checks if there are any changes on the website and tells you about them. You can then decide whether you are interested enough to call up the actual posting.
Q. Isn't that more useful for something like BBC News?
That's exactly the kind of thing it was designed for. Imagine you are interested in the news but have an RSS feed from the Sun newspaper. There will only be a few items you want to follow up on.
It can still be used with something like the ComeAllWithin message board, but it's more useful to people who read the occasional post rather than people who compulsively read every message including the Mornington Crescent and the Word Association threads! So better for lurkers and people who like to pick which messages they read.
Q. So do I need something special to read an RSS feed.
You need an RSS reader. I use Microsoft Outlook’s RSS reader as it’s part of Outlook. All the posts then look like email messages. However, you just need to Google “RSS reader” for any number of free readers. I also tested on http://www.theoldreader.com (which is a variety of the Google reader), but there are plenty to pick from.
Q. But there aren't any Harlequins RSS feeds are there?
Surprisingly enough, both the official Harlequins web site and ComeAllWithin have RSS feeds. Hand on heart I wouldn’t recommend either of them, simply because they don’t update often enough and I’ll show you an RSS feed that includes changes from those sites and more.
Q. But if the Harlequins message board doesn’t have an RSS feed, how can you provide one?
Well, I work in IT but I’m no web programmer! I read in the paper about some software that might do the trick – in this case a Yahoo utility called Dapper for making the RSS feed. You can use it to take the fields you want off a website. It’s not very sophisticated in some ways, but its ability to choose just what you want of the web page is very good.
Q. So are there drawbacks to this software?
Oh yes. It can be slow or flaky or simply not return anything. But what do you expect for free? Also the data returned can be anything up to 15 minutes out of date. The date/time handling is wrong in the Outlook reader, but right in the other one – so which RSS reader you use may be important.
Q. OK. I’ve got an RSS reader, now what?
Now you need to subscribe to any or all of these feeds:
Simply right click on the link and your browser should offer you the option to copy the URL.
Feed that URL into the RSS reader as a subscription
Note: Clicking on the date will take you to the last post in the thread (as on the message board)
Conclusion
Well I’ve only tried this with two readers, and they’re not even consistent between themselves. If you decide to try this and run into problems, then let me know and I’ll try and look at it.
Enjoy!
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19:30 seems to be a good timeout time.
If you click on the link
[open.dapper.net]
You should just get a page of text starting
This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.
<rss version="2.0">
<!-- status:success -->
<channel>
<link>[www.rugbynetwork.net];
<title>HarlequinsMessageBoard</title>
<description>Transformation of Dapp into RSS</description>
<webMaster>open-dapper@yahoo-inc.com</webMaster>
<pubDate>Mon, 01 Jul 2013 11:23:19 -0700</pubDate>
...
If you see that, then the feed should work!
Actually I find it has changed how I monitor CAW now. I no longer stay on the website and refresh messages every now and then. I just eye the newsfeed now and again, and if there's something of interest near the top I open it.
It also makes monitoring the rugby news generally much easier.