New RSS Feed Feature

[Tim Green]

H&M Forums now generates an RSS feed of the latest 25 postings on the forum. This allows you to keep up to date with the latest postings even in threads you are not participating in (automatic notifications are only sent for threads you initiate or have posted in).

The link to the feed is the new orange RSS or XML button (varies depending on your forum style) in the second line of the forum menu, which is displayed after you log on.

About RSS Feeds:

To view RSS feeds you need an RSS-enabled browser or mail client like Opera or Mozilla Thunderbird (the mail counterpart to the Firefox browser) or a stand-alone RSS viewer program called an "RSS aggregator". A number of excellent free programs are available. For details Google on rss feeds newbies tutorial and you'll find plenty of information. A good place to start is this article on cnet:

RSS News You Choose

About the H&M Forums feed:

You cannot answer posts from the feed and no graphics etc. are included! To reply to a post click on the link to view the original post in the forum, and you must also log on because postings are only allowed by registered users.

The feed is sent from a robot mail account that does not receive mails. If you try to send mails to the feed robot they will be deleted automatically and you will receive an automated reply informing you of this.

Changing the number of postings in the feed:

By default the feed sends out the latest 25 postings. You can change this by adding ?c=x to the end of the feed URL, where "x" is the number of postings you want to receive. The maximum is 50.

Enjoy!

[Martin Wynne]

H&M Forums now generates an RSS feed
of the latest 25 postings on the forum.

Hi Tim,

Many thanks for setting up the RSS feed. It is working fine.

For a feed reader I use the freeware Abilon from http://www.abilon.org
which seems to work very well. I have set it to check every 10 minutes
and pop up a message whenever there is new content. It also archives
the last 7 days worth of postings.

This is a much better way of tracking these forums than having to remember
to visit the web site.

Thanks again,

Martin.

[Tim Green]

Hi Martin,

Thanks for the feedfeedback!

And also thanks for the tip on Abilon -- I just installed it and it's great, highly recommended and very easy to use.

Tip for restricted Windows account users:
Like far too many programs Abilon assumes you are working in an Admin account. Particularly with Windows this is a bad idea, particularly if your computer is connected to the Internet with an always-on broadband connection. To run Abilon from a restricted account you just need to set write and modify permissions recursively for normal users (or for your specific user account, that's safer) on the entire Abilon program folder.

[KingStairs]

The RSS feed is an invalid XML file - the title tag contains a plain & (ampersand).
Any compliant XML parser will reject the feed.

[Tim Green]

Thanks for pointing this out. I thought I had got all the ampersands out (I checked it with three different aggregators that all accepted it) but I forgot that the board title and description, which are no longer used because of the graphical headers, still contained ampersands, and they are taken from a variable.

Fixed.