Enable the RSS feed feature

[Unimaxium]

I think it would be nice if chase or someone could enable an RSS feed for the forum. I was just checking online to see if vBulletin has support for that, and indeed it does. On forums that have it enabled, one can go to the RSS feed in the reader of your choice and check up on all the latest posts that have happened in the whole forum or on individual forums (e.g. general photography, photo gallery, off-topic, etc.). I think this would be a really nice feature to implement, and if it were implemented I might even take it upon myself to make a TPF RSS reader dashboard widget for the OSX 10.4 users out there. And for those who use Konfabulator, it wouldn't be much work to make a widget that works on Windows either. This would let TPFers check up on their favorite site more frequently and more easily. This is just a suggestion of a feature that I think would be nice, and I don't think it should be hard at all to implement (as far as I know, all you have to do is turn on a setting in the admin control panel). Maybe there's some specific reason that it's not already turned on, but if there's not then I think it would be quite nice if it were turned on.

PS: here is an example of what I am talking about:
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/external.php?type=rss

 

[Chase]

The feature has been turned on...have at it!

 

[Meysha]

Ohhh this could be cool... if I could understand it.... mainly coz I've never used any feeds. I've got no idea how all this works but from googling I've figured out you need a feed reader.

Can you recommend a good feed reader for the time being until Unimaxium creates those little widgets???

(You da man, Unimaxium!!!)

Edit: Ok I downloaded FeedReader 2.90 but I dunno what the address is for the feed. I've tried to have a look around but I can't find an addy anywhere.

 

[Unimaxium]

The URL for the feed is:
http://thephotoforum.com/forum/external.php?type=rss
This will get you the last 15 posts from the whole forum. If you want to see just the posts in a particular forum, then you add a little snippet into the URL so that it looks something like this:
http://thephotoforum.com/forum/external.php?forumids=##?type=rss
Where ## is the number of the forum you want to get the thread for. Here is a list of the numbers for all the forums:
Main forum: 13
Photo Gallery: 18
Critique gallery: 32
Photo themes: 28
Alternative techniques: 27
Darkroom: 25
Examples, how-tos,...: 16
Bloopers: 24
Photo Locations: 31
Wedding & Portrait: 35
Photographic discussion: 38
Classifieds: 26
Advice & Reviews on Equipment: 17
Collector's Corner: 29
Photography sites: 15
Off-topic: 19
Welcomes & introductions: 23
Creative Corner: 33
Feedback & Suggestions: 14
Test Forum: 21
Design & Content: 39

And here's the cool part. You can also change the URL so the feed will display multiple forums. For example, to see the latest posts in the General Photo forum, and the off-topic forum, the URL would be:
http://www.thephotoforum.com/forum/external.php?forumids=13,19?type=rss

This is a pretty cool feature. You can customize your feed to just about anything you want. And I bet there are other criteria that I don't even know about that you can use to customize your feed even more. A google search might reveal some more.

 

[Chase]

Thanks for the suggestions and the information!

 

[Meysha]

Ok... This is so cool!! I've set it up and it works really well!

A question though:
How often does it update... I mean I don't wanna come back after a few weeks of not being here and suddenly receive like a million notifications of all the threads that've been done.
But if say, I'm offline for a few days... is it then going to get all the threads that've been done since then.. or only the most recent 15?

 

[Unimaxium]

The feed will only have the most recent 15 on it. The feed itself should update every time a new post is made, but you will probably have to set a refresh time in your Feed Reader