How about adding an rss feed to the site? Could be as simple as most recent threads or as complex as an individual feed for each category.

If it's said by Chris to not be possible, due to time constraints, programatic issues, or otherwise.. I am capable of writing a parser that would generate the simple one on a chron basis....

Amen to that!

I asked about this a few months back but had no response. Also able to lend a hand if needed.

Regards,
Nick

I am also able to lend a hand if need be. A guy I used to work with co-wrote the spec for it :-)

I personally would love to have an RSS feed to my desktop at work. I think my work colleages are a little too familiar with the locostbuilders logo ;-)

excuse my ignorance here, but what do you mean by an RSS feed?

RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal weblogs. But it's not just for news. Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS: the "recent changes" page of a wiki, a changelog of CVS checkins, even the revision history of a book. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way.

RSS-aware programs called news aggregators are popular in the weblogging community. Many weblogs make content available in RSS. A news aggregator can help you keep up with all your favorite weblogs by checking their RSS feeds and displaying new items from each of them.

There are apparently SEVEN different formats which might make integration a little difficult.

RazMan - thank you for your detailed explanation. So in essence it would be a bit like subscribing to a thread in a forum and being update if any posts are added to that thread?

How would it be integrated anddisplay itself on LBC?

Nick

Being a non techie IT person. My head now hurts and I am none the wiser.

But I'm sure it will look lovely

- Jim

In this case it would probably be like looking at the list of most recently posts on the homepage, but without having to visit the site. It might be overkill to have it on a thread basis (since there are a lot of threads) but a topic basis might be good, agregating any new threads on that topic into a list. You can look it from any rss reader without visiting the site. The reader automatically gets the updated info periodically for you and you can look at it when you like.

For example in firefox, you can create links to css feeds in the toolbar which drop down a clickable list of all the most recent items when you click on them. I think it has the bbc news 'latest headlines' feed by default. Very convienient and work-friendly since you don't have to visit the page to see whats going on

www.google.co.uk/ig also allows you to put feeds directly onto your customised homepage, so you can look at more than one thing at once. I have Tiger Club, bbc news, silicon.com, local weather and gmail all on my homepage. I'd love to be able to add builders forum.


[Edited on 3/2/06 by davidcarr]

Perhaps a poll is in order to gauge the interest?

I write software that among other things provides news feeds for pro and collegiate athletics. When I find a team website that doesn't offer an RSS feed, I write a software program that pulls the page on a schedule, then dissects the html into discrete components of Headline, link and abstract and discarding the rest. Then I format those into an RSS2.0 spec document and move it onto one of my servers for publishing. It's a closed system for the teams and people who sign up to use our software package, but I would be willing to provide one for Locostbuilders. But only if there is nothing pre-available from the forum software provider.

No wonder you are building a large headache

LOL!

I'd also like an RSS feed ... I already use RSS to watch about 30 or 40 seperate websites, and I'd love to be able to add this to that list, rather than trawling backwards and forwards through the forums section.

As for a poll, no thanks, lets just do it

Cheers
Richard

Yay! I love RSS feeds. I integrate them with my google homepage.

You can do it once you have a gmail account, then go to: http://google.com/ig
click Add Content, then Create A Section,
paste your RSS link in, and voila!

I don't even mind that google tracks my every move now.

Well, I hate to put a damper on this, but I don't have time to write something like that. However, if someone else has time/expertise to write one I'll happily assist with the bits they need.

For the techy minded - the site runs on a quite heavily modified version of XMB forum, but I guess you'd connect straight to the database (mySQL)? We're on an x86 Linux platform so the code needs to be able to run under that - preferably Perl so I understand it!

I'm sure it's not a difficult job, I just don't have the time at the moment to be figuring out how RSS works!

Chris

Well I'll write one that just looks at the site every 15 minutes for changes and kicks out a new one if it finds something. It's no problem.

What I do need from you ChrisW is some way of placing the rss feeds back on to your site so that people can subscribe to them.

Chris, you can add a little orange RSS button for each feed I create. Maybe an RSS specific page? or a button link off of every forum category?

I'll do one for most recent, and then one for each of the forum categories. I will be getting to it sometime mid-week at the earliest.

Everyone happy?

You can email me or U2U me with upload info Chris. FTP is easiest for me.

Any news on this?
Mac

I spent some time trying to get my parser to deliver the raw html from the various locostbuilder forums, but for some odd reason the query I send only returns some basic header info and not the actual html. It's different from other php sites I have parsed in that this is the first one that I can't read the pages out of it.

I have a few other ideas to try, but at this point I am not sure if I can do it.

I got really sidetracked with a bunch of NBA and NHL and NASCAR projects and this took a back-seat. But NBA and NHL are all but over so now I can get back onto it.

OK. So at the risk of sounding stoopid, will the RSS feed work like the Reuters ticker which runs on the desktop of my PC? Would be great if it did. I could keep an eye on the FOR SALE posts more easily!

For this discussion - RSS is designed to deliver a headline, a short abstract and a link back to the full article on a website.

You can subscribe to an rss feed (use the 'for sale' section of this forum as an example) and when there is new information, your newsreader (there are many free ones) will inform you that the content has changed. You can look at the headlines and read the abstract on your desktop, and if you are interested in reading more, you click the link back to the forum.

I want to have an rss feed for each section of the locostbuilders site, subscribe to the ones I am interested in and have the notifications be delivered to me without having to browse through each section looking for the headlines that interest me.

With the site getting as large as it is, it's difficult for a busy person, such as myself, to find the time to get into all the forums to even read the latest post headlines.

Wouldn't that be a cool tool?

Now, how about a Locostbuilders.co.uk newsreader that only delivered locostbuilder feeds to a ticker on your desktop?

Chris, I realize you said you are using a heavily modified version of the XMB forum software, but I did some research into the XMB project and they have an RSS hack available. You basically have to get the rss.php file from their most recent release and see if it works. It may actually work right out of the box if you havent changed the database schema too significantly... Worth a try? I think so!


Edit - Added link to the xmb rss hack thread

http://forums.xmbforum.com/viewthread.php?tid=755371

quote:

---

Originally posted by ChrisW
Well, I hate to put a damper on this, but I don't have time to write something like that. However, if someone else has time/expertise to write one I'll happily assist with the bits they need.

For the techy minded - the site runs on a quite heavily modified version of XMB forum, but I guess you'd connect straight to the database (mySQL)? We're on an x86 Linux platform so the code needs to be able to run under that - preferably Perl so I understand it!

I'm sure it's not a difficult job, I just don't have the time at the moment to be figuring out how RSS works!

Chris

---

I make newsreaders for sports teams and think that a LocostBuilders Branded reader would be cool. It might look like this on your desktop. The latest headlines would scroll in the ticker.



Locostbuilder NewsReader

Have downloaded LCDSmartie for my proposed Home Theatre PC. It has RSS feeds on it. I WANT RSS FROM THIS SITE TOO!

any progress???

Any news on RSS?

It appears that my parser will not read this website correctly, so my creating the feeds is out of the question. However, I did some investigating into XMB (the code this site was created from) and they offer a simple php file that would function to generate the needed rss feeds. And it might be as easy as placing this already written php file on the server and then performing at most 1/2 hour of configuration to make it work. It is not my place to make this a demand on Chris or to even know how much this forum software has been customized. Just pointing out that RSS feeds are now possible to be generated from XMB forums.