EvC RSS feed?

I really don't have a clue how RSS feeds work; in fact, as far as I'm concerned, my computer functions only because special, scary magic.This having been said, I was wondering how difficult (or indeed, if it was at all possible) to set up a feed from here to my Google personalised homepage so that I could see the most recent few topics in this forum as they came up.Probably its not possible, but it would be kind of sexy. In an EvC kind of way.Someone put me straight?

Anything is possible when you have technomagic. I intend to really play with RSS at some point, since I like it, but the simple answer to your question on how difficult it would be is 'probably too difficult'.Like anything, it's easy if you know how, but if your system is one of those special scary magic boxes, its probably easier just to ask someone else to set it up. Like Percy I suspect that in reality, what you want to set up is fairly trivial, so watch this space.

Many big things have begun in just this way. "I really intend to get into this religion thing at some point," Jesus is said to have commented to a friend after his baptism by John. Beyond that RSS stands for "Really Special and Scary", I know nothing about it.Okay, I just looked it up, it stands for "Really Simple Syndication". Sounds neat, and Wikipedia uses it. I wonder if RSS capability is built into Wiki?Anyone who is interested and capable (or capable of learning): I want to provide a Wikipedia-style capability that focuses on creation/evolution terms and issues. It would be like Wikipedia as far as capabiilities, but articles could only be updated by EvC members, similar to how TalkOrigins archive articles can only be updated by TalkOrigins administrators. Wiki is downloadable off the net.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

This easy. This is not dynamic (and only contains 2 items, due to laziness), but making it so, whilst in some ways tricky, in other ways isn't.I say that because the easiest way to do it, would be to have it integrated into the board's function (which will probably be included in dboard 3.0 ), and I don't want to put strain on Percy's server without permission (especially since its his birthday )Edited by Modulous, : stupid smilies

Sorry I haven't got back sooner... I didn't really understand your code thingy in your post. Thanks for showing willing though! It seems that RSS is just a distant dream at the moment, but I guess it isn't all that important anyway.I'm going to bed now, as its far too late.Take care.

It's just a link to the rss file. You should point your RSS tracker to that address - in your case you should tell google that is the address of the RSS file.

Oh wow - thanks a lot. That rules!Night!

Yes, I've done that now, and it works.The ability to update is clearly a key component. I gather from what you say that this wouldn't be possible without a disproportionate amount of work or until the current board architecture was updated. Thanks a lot for doing it at all though.I'm also interested in what you said about bandwidth concerns; am I understanding you correctly that if a significant amount of people took this service up it could punish Percy's bandwidth? I wouldn't have thought of that.Thanks again!

Kind of yeah. As far as I can tell, if I were to do it, I'd have to write a script that periodically checked to see if there were any new threads, and then add them to the feed. I've never really done anything like that before, so were I to do it, it'd probably be crap and take an absurd amount of time to get right. On the other hand Percy could integrate something into the board that simply updated the feed with the new threads as they were made. Much easier It would possibly increase his bandwidth, or it could decrease it, depending on how it was set up. Lots of people downloading an rss file periodically is probably less bandwidth that running server script to display all topics every few minutes. The lurkers can go away and do other stuff, just keeping an eye on interesting new threads.The problem is that if I were to do it, it would require me testing it, and running scripts against another person's website (even if the intention is benign) is considered bad form. The reason being that if my script goes apeshit (eg a stupid bug gets the script into an infinite loop of requesting pages from the server) I could end up accidentally performing a one man Denial of Service attack against the site. It probably won't make an enormous difference (the site is fairly robust I believe), but it can be irritating nevertheless.