RSS feed?

[ChadTower]

Don't see one... do we have an RSS feed here?  I'm tempted to slap together an XBMC script to access a couple of arcade related sites (such as here, maybe Retroblast too).

[sirwoogie]

Just isn't a link for it. Don't know why they didn't put it in the default themes. I'll be adding an icon for it once we do a custom theme.

Forum: http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?type=rss;action=.xml
Wiki: http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/w/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&feed=rss

Excerpt from the SMF instructions:

All of the XML content is accessed via the ".xml" action... To get RSS or RSS2 out of that (not viewable in most browsers), add ";type=rss" or ";type=rss2" to that URL.

The default feed is the 5 most recent posts:
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?action=.xml

There are several "sub-actions" available to this action, specifying exactly what to display:

Recent Posts (displays the most recent posts that you can see)
"Sub-action": recent
Default: Shows 5 most recent posts
Available options:
limit=x - display the "x" most recent posts (if number is less than 5, it will display 5. If number is larger than 255, it will display 255).
board=y - display only the recent posts from board "y"
Example: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?action=.xml;sa=recent;board=72;limit=10

News (displays the first post from the most recent topics that you can see)
"Sub-action": news
Available options:
limit=x - display only "x" items
board=y - display only news topics from board "y"
Example: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?action=.xml;sa=news;board=72;limit=10

Members (displays most recent members) - note: There is a bug in the current version of SMF that prevents this from working right - see Latest Members XML Problem for the fix
"Sub-action": members
Available options:
limit=x - display only the "x" most recent members
Example: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?action=.xml;sa=members;limit=10

Profile (displays the "profile summary" data in a nice XML feed for the specified user)
"Sub-action": profile
Required option:
u=x - display the profile info for user whose ID is "x"
Example: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?action=.xml;sa=profile;u=150

Now - you're probably wondering what you can do with this. Quite a bit actually.

You can syndicate this stuff by giving people these URLs to use on their sites (they will need to have their own RSS parser to deal with it though - CaRP is a good free one (requires PHP)). You can also use PHP's XML Parser Functions to format the output the way you want it (although you can also do this using SSI.php).

You can also subscribe to these feeds through an XML reader, Firefox, Thunderbird or any other software that supports XML or RSS feeds (note - Outlook and Outlook Express do not support this...) - you will need to have either "type=rss" or "type=rss2" somewhere in the URL for it to work. If you would like to know how to set this up in Firefox or Thunderbird, let me know. Enjoy!

Some other handy ones:

• The "board" parameter can also take a list by using commas (e.g. board=1,2,3,4) so you don't have to get a listing from everything. Handy for general feeds, but still ignore the ones you don't care about.

The forum can also do WAP output (normally this is autodetected):

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?wap
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?wap2
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?imode

[ChadTower]

Sweet.  I figured there had to at least be a nonconfigured option for it.  No idea if I'll get to it any time soon but I was watching the default XBMC skin scroll what appeard to be an RSS feed from xbox-scene.com and thinking well damn that shouldn't be hard to duplicate for BYOAC.  I don't know Python but I used to make a living as a PERL developer.  Shouldn't be hard to pick Python up.

[saint]

Let me know if the text link works please. I set it to the last 20 messages, let me know if that's insane.

[ChadTower]

What do you mean by "the text link"? 

I have been poking around in the RSS feed via a Firefox plugin... works well so far, I'm getting the most recent 5 posts.  Not sure if that's a client setting off the top of my head.

[saint]

Up above, on the blue menu bar, far right, under the list of forums

[ChadTower]

Found it.  I was able to drag that directly to the RSS client, drop it there, the client recognized it properly and loaded up 20 items.  Seems to work just fine.

[saint]

Thanks!  Does 20 seem about right?

[ChadTower]

I use a lot of RSS feeds and they vary pretty widely.  Given that it creates an item for every post in every thread, 20 seems to be a good place to start.  RSS is better for near-time monitoring than it is for trying to look at the overall picture.

[sirwoogie]

...Given that it creates an item for every post in every thread, 20 seems to be a good place to start.

Remember, you can also use the 'sa=news' function to get links to only the updated "topics."

As for RSS feed links, once we do the update to the forum and consolidate our themes, there will be RSS icons for each board, feed buttons on the main index, and automatic identification to the browsers that support feed discovery.

[ChadTower]

Remember, you can also use the 'sa=news' function to get links to only the updated "topics."

Niiiice.  I didn't know about that.  I popped that on the end of the URL, created a Channel in my RSS client, and it works just as well.  That might be a bit prettier as a GUI scroll on something like XBMC.


EDIT:  well, looks like I don't have to do it!  It's already built in.  I'll give it a shot and report back.