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geoff
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Joined: 28 May 2004
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 Posted: Fri May 13, 2005 3:04 pm Post subject: Upcoming feature: RSS Feeds |
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If you log into the website you'll see a new feature allowing you to enter RSS feels which will eventually be delivered to you by SMS. Currently you can only register new feeds into the system, but you won't receive anything quite yet: I'll update this thread once the back-end is running.
Geoff. |
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geoff
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| Posted: Thu May 19, 2005 5:40 pm Post subject: |
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The first stage of the RSS roll-out will begin tomorrow, and I'm going to need some testers. Therefore:
For the first few weeks, all RSS feed messages will be FREE! This will only be for beta-testers, so please add your feeds to your account NOW as the offer will close once I have enough testers. I will post here again when the offer closes.
The service will eventually work as follows:
1) You enter just about any RSS feed URL that you like. For instance, the BBC News headline RSS feed would be
http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/front_page/rss.xml
2) You set how many messages you are willing to receive in blocks of 2-hours. This means that you can subscribe to very busy feeds without the risk of getting dozens of messages every day.
3) You will receive a message as follows:
| Code: | | BBC News: Star Wars film leaked online --- Copies of the final Star Wars film appear on an internet file-sharing network hours after it wen... http://av.gs/99ad |
The URL is optional, but if you have a phone with a web-browser it allows you to jump to the feed URL. I have deliberately registered the shortest domain I can in order to allow a maximum amount of text in the available space.
4) Finally, in the second stage of the roll-out, an optional search string will be allowed in order to restrict which items you get from each feed. For instance, if you're only interested in news items relevant to Michael Jackson, you would subscribe to the BBC News headline feed together with the search string 'Jackson'. |
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geoff
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| Posted: Thu May 19, 2005 6:14 pm Post subject: |
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Apologies to anyone who has recently added any RSS feeds: I just lost them all when uploaded an new module... I guess that's why they call you testers  . |
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geoff
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| Posted: Sat May 21, 2005 12:34 pm Post subject: |
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Ok, the feeds should be live now. The 'include URL' feature is currently not enabled but will probably appear some time in the next few days.
Geoff. |
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geoff
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Joined: 28 May 2004
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| Posted: Sun May 22, 2005 4:01 pm Post subject: |
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| geoff wrote: | | The 'include URL' feature is currently not enabled but will probably appear some time in the next few days. |
Ok, this is working as well. The shortened links which look something like
http://av.gs/8a3d
are valid for 7 days only, so don't bookmark them... |
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steeev
Joined: 23 Jun 2004
Posts: 21
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| Posted: Mon May 23, 2005 11:32 am Post subject: |
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blimey this is an brilliant idea, kudos!
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mwright
Joined: 28 May 2004
Posts: 109
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| Posted: Mon May 23, 2005 11:45 am Post subject: |
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| geoff wrote: | | geoff wrote: | | The 'include URL' feature is currently not enabled but will probably appear some time in the next few days. |
Ok, this is working as well. The shortened links which look something like
http://av.gs/8a3d
are valid for 7 days only, so don't bookmark them... |
Do bear in mind if you follow the links - that (at least the BBC ones) will be for a full blown WEB page which is going to be hard work for a phone browser to render! And also pretty "expensive" to read!
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geoff
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| Posted: Mon May 23, 2005 11:55 am Post subject: |
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| mwright wrote: | | geoff wrote: | | geoff wrote: | | The 'include URL' feature is currently not enabled but will probably appear some time in the next few days. |
Ok, this is working as well. The shortened links which look something like
http://av.gs/8a3d
are valid for 7 days only, so don't bookmark them... |
Do bear in mind if you follow the links - that (at least the BBC ones) will be for a full blown WEB page which is going to be hard work for a phone browser to render! And also pretty "expensive" to read! |
You need to get yourself a Treo 650.
Can't you turn off the downloading of images on your phone?
I wonder if an HTML-to-TEXT renderer might help? That would be easy for me to do. |
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mwright
Joined: 28 May 2004
Posts: 109
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| Posted: Mon May 23, 2005 12:10 pm Post subject: |
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| geoff wrote: | Can't you turn off the downloading of images on your phone?
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Yep - it does not make much difference since it is the layout of the pages that causes the problem.
| geoff wrote: | | I wonder if an HTML-to-TEXT renderer might help? That would be easy for me to do. |
What I did for my Mobile/Small Screen RSS reader that I wrote was to provide the ability to rewrite the urls in the XML.
For example - if you read the BBC Technology RSS feed you will see links like
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/1/hi/technology/4568917.stm
but the same data is at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/1/low/technology/4568917.stm
in a format that is much easier to display on a phone browser. So all I did was provide the ability to substitute /low/ for /hi/ in BBC xml links!
Works really well - assuming that you control the feeds of course. I just let people pick from a list of pre-defined feeds as well as allowing them to define their own
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geoff
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| Posted: Mon May 23, 2005 12:59 pm Post subject: |
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If you notice that your RSS feed has been 'disabled' (i.e. the disable flag has appeared beside it), this is because you either entered the URL wrong or you entered the URL for a non-RSS web-page.
I'll make this interface slightly nicer at some point. |
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geoff
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| Posted: Mon May 23, 2005 1:45 pm Post subject: |
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| In order to give everyone a fair chance to play whilst the messages are free, I've limited all feeds to 5 messages per two-hour block. This limitation will be removed once the system goes 'live'. |
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steeev
Joined: 23 Jun 2004
Posts: 21
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| Posted: Mon May 23, 2005 2:40 pm Post subject: |
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it would be cool if you could include a flag saying whether you just want updates to the current rss feed, rather than get the whole feed at once.
what i mean is say you goto the bbc news site, you read the current news, and think ah i know what i will go and add this feed to my vgsmail feeds.
then after you add it, you get all the news headlines youve already just read via text.
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geoff
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| Posted: Mon May 23, 2005 3:08 pm Post subject: |
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| steeev wrote: | it would be cool if you could include a flag saying whether you just want updates to the current rss feed, rather than get the whole feed at once.
what i mean is say you goto the bbc news site, you read the current news, and think ah i know what i will go and add this feed to my vgsmail feeds.
then after you add it, you get all the news headlines youve already just read via text. |
Yeah, it was intended that you would only ever be informed of 'future' changes. However, there is a bug which just became apparent and I am working on it. The trouble is that some feeds (notably BBC) 'republish' their RSS items several times when small changes are made to the actual web-article.
Anyway, consider what you're after as the 'default' once I've fixed the bugs... |
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steeev
Joined: 23 Jun 2004
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geoff
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| Posted: Tue May 24, 2005 1:52 pm Post subject: |
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| mwright wrote: |
Do bear in mind if you follow the links - that (at least the BBC ones) will be for a full blown WEB page which is going to be hard work for a phone browser to render! And also pretty "expensive" to read! |
This is now 'fixed'. For more details, look here:
http://forum.vgsmail.com/viewtopic.php?t=247 |
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