Google Alert strings specific to new topics (or posts, if I have to) in this forum...
 

Hello fellow Slackers :)

I've been playing around with Google Alerts trying to find a way to [hopefully] receive quick and timely notifications about new *threads* being posted to this forum.

As an alternative, "Plan B", I suppose new *posts* in this forum 'might' suffice, although the traffic still might be too much. Besides, I already receive a notification email a few times a day about new activity in this forum with the subject line, "Slackware update', which I use to follow active threads.

I've had some success with using the handles of my fav slackers here, but that usually only let's me know that one of you has responded to a thread by another OP.

What I want is a notification of the OP's thread creation in this forum.

Has anyone worked with Google Alerts in this fashion? And if so, how successful has that been for you.

Yes, I know I can use an RSS reader, but then I have to watch that window, and since I check my mail most often, it would work better for me to simply set up mail filters and have the notifications come in from Google Alerts.

Yeah, this is kind of a rehash of some similar topics already (but haven't considered Google Alerts as a possibility), although I'm still not really able to beat some of you to the gate and be the first to respond to help requests (even at 3:30 in the morning ;)

As an extremely impractical solution to this issue, it would be possible to just hit the refresh button in the browser while at the top level of the Slackware forums, but I really don't think that anyone actually does that.

Thoughts? Ideas? Solutions (even partial ones)?

Kindest regards

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Is there an rss feed just for this forum then? I might be inclined to use it - I have quite a loud trill in akregator for new feed updates. Never tried google alerts though.

I don't think Google Alerts is flexible enough to do what you want. If you want a search string then the following might work for new posts:
That string should be on every page and it'll only search within this forum...but I don't know of a way to get new threads just from today.

For RSS, try http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ernal.php?f=14 (see this thread). There are several RSS to e-mail solutions out there, if you want. Again that still just gets posts and not new threads. Getting just new threads is kind of difficult since the original date isn't on the main forum page (just the date of the last post), so any script to index new threads would have to pull each thread and find only the new ones (which would take time and bandwidth). Maybe to run such a script once a day wouldn't be the end of the world but it would be fairly kludgy.

[edit]Maybe that RSS feed does just get new threads...[/edit]

Ok testing now in akregator.