Thanks Jeremy,

COOL!
somehow I missed those...

Cheers, Leon.

Is it possible to syndicate this data:
I'd like to put it on my website.

That info is currently not available, but I could make it so if enough people are interested.

--jeremy

Wouldn't it be better to simply have one RSS feed for the latest threads? Let people use the forum id number as a variable in the URL if they wish to filter the feed to specific forums, and if no forum id is provided in the URL then have the script spit out the "all forums" version. That should be both easier to implement/maintain and more satisfying for the users, who could subscribe to a feed for any forum they want. Thank you.

It would be much easier to maintain. We had to move to a highly cached system though, so dynamic feeds are not currently available (in fact, it used to work exactly as you explain).

--jeremy

I became curious about this RSS stuff and came across this thread. I see it is very old and most of the links are defunct.

I saw a couple of web sites that supposedly explained RSS and used some big words like aggregator and syndication and.. uh.. maybe gonkulator was in there .

Anyway, I still don't really understand what RSS would give me and why I would want it. From what I've seen it looks like it would put an annoying animated scrolling thingy on my desktop with links to other content, maybe LQ threads or something. Ok, I know there must be more to it, but this is my initial impression.

Maybe somebody could post some screen shots that show RSS in action and maybe help clarify for me what it's all about.

Thanks...

RSS is just a type of XML used for storing data (a bit like a web page but more structured). How the client application displays it is up to it. Some programs like the KDE news ticker display a scrolling ticker. Other apps have more of an e-mail client look:
http://www.rssowl.org/overview

Firefox also has a live bookmark feature (this is probably one of the best uses for the LQ feeds):
http://www.mozilla.org/products/fire...bookmarks.html

There are also lots of other uses - some LQ Radio uses them to let people access the latest clips and you can even use them to add content to your own website, many CMS programs include support for RSS feeds.

Thanks. I installed that rssowl and was able to create a linux category and added the link to
http://www.linuxquestions.org/syndicate/slackware.xml as a new favorite.

I see that it's a news reader sort of format. I opened up the above link and saw a few entries that looked like thread titles. I clicked on them and they gave me links back to LQ slackware threads.

Well, at least it's a start. I guess I'll just have to play around with it and check out the features and options. Right now it's just looks like an extra step to getting at the slackware threads.
(just using that as an example)

The LQ feeds don't include the full post content (which some other feeds do), mainly for bandwidth I think. If you are looking for a better way to access the threads then using the FireFox live bookmarks feature would probably be better (assuming you use firefox). Then again there will always be a delay in the feed updating so it's not a complete replacement for browsing

Yeah, I'm using firefox and noticed that little orange icon in the lower right corner.
I'll play around with that also.
(it may all be too structured for my haphazard surfing methods. )

Thanks...

Hi Jeremy,

These feeds seem to have some problems. The Debian, Slackware and SuSE work, but the Fedora and Redhat are giving a 404 Not Found.

Unfortunately the older ones end in .rss, not .xml. This is something we'll clean up after we redo the forums.

--jeremy

What's wrong with the current forums?

I should update myself with the podcasts.

w00t live bookmark (firefox)

yeah- I would like that too.. (the xxx posts, xxx numbers)

check out my site at http://titaniumgeek.blogspot.com

titanium_geek

EDIT_ that wasn't a shameless plug- it was meant to demonstrate the cool syndication features- which I don't use now. site is defunct, btw.