For my thesis papper I have to create a browser based game of chess in XUL, SVG, AJAX, XML, CSS (all the weird stuff I like). The game itself it's up and running.

The users have the posibility to make moves by sending an e-mail or post a move on their blog.

I know that most blogs have a rss feed, so i get the XML and i can get the moves. For the e-mail part it's a little bit complicated, but i can manage that.

The game runs on a server with Slackware 12.

The question is: how can i get the information i need ? I can use cron to download periodically each users RSS feed, or check the mail database, but i don't think it is the best solution.

Anyone has other ideas?

E-mail chess servers should be the *least* complicated part IMHO. They've been around since people used say, GOPHER. The big pro of it is that it is a push approach (you only receive messages and parse them) plus they conform to a standard (ICS, IIRC) so that cuts down on error checking as well. A pull approach, where you are forced to initiate sampling of HTTP "Content Not Changed" server responses to "know" if there's a new move, will cost you as in game lag vs server performance. Just my thoughts.