Mike Finley

I host moderate and/or participate in a fairly wide range of forum systems, and found one thing conspicuously absent in the group forums here on red-bubble – the ability to get notification of posts in a forum or topic you are interested in. The problem is compounded by the fact that each group has its own separate forum, each of which you have to navigate to.

There is an RSS feed

I grumbled to one of the group leaders about this, and was told that there was in fact an RSS feed for the forums. This seemed promising, as i use RSS feeds on one of my own sites to notify when someone posts a new image, or a new exhibition date. (I really don’t like having to go chasing round websites to see if anything has been added!)

(For an overview of RSS on redbubble see Craig Shillington’s RSS is here journal entry. It includes a lot of useful information on setting up an RSS reader, which I won’t repeat!)

Feeds and Group Forums

There is a separate feed for each forum within a group, but as Craig has already commented there is no useful indication on the page that an RSS feed is present. (You can tell if you know what to look for – if you look at the page address in the browser toolbar, you’ll see an orange icon on the righthand side if there is an RSS feed.)

If you subscribe to the feed on the forum you are interested in, following Craig’s instructions, you will get ‘notified’ of new messages or topics in that forum. Thsi isn’t much of a gain unless you already have a newsfeed reader in use, or you are going to monitor several different forums in different groups. Its a big gain for me, since I use Google reader on my iGoogle page, so I get a quick check whenever I open a new browser window. (and, as I said, I’m already using it to monitor other sites).

problems

Unfortunately, there are some bugs in the current feed implementation – the structure doesn’t follow the standard, and nor does it follow recommendations for maximum
interoperability with readers. (These bugs have been reported to redbubble support). At present, I can’t get the feed to work correctly inside an email rss client, which would possibly be more useful – I’ll recheck this when the current bugs are fixed.

status

I’ve checked the current feed using the Google reader and using bloglines and it works satisfactorily in both. I haven’t checked any of Craig’s recommendations

Problem solved? well, not really, but its a useful halfway step (for me at least), and provides a possible starting point.

I’ll be happy to try to sort out any queries on the above … and I’d be delighted if someone else tells me I’ve wasted my time and gives me a better solution :smile:

hope this helps someone!