For all the RSS feeds I subscribe to I use Google Reader, which I love. I do however have a couple of specific RSS feeds that I'd like to be notified of as soon as they get updated (say, for example, an RSS feed for a forum I like to monitor and respond to as quickly as possible).
Are there any tools out there for this kind of monitoring which also have some kind of alert functionality (for example, a prompt window)?
I've tried Simbolic RSS Alert but I found it a bit buggy and couldn't get it to alert me as often as I liked.
Suggestions? Or perhaps a different experience with Simbolic?
If you have access to Microsoft Outlook 2007 or Thunderbird, these email clients allow you to add RSS feeds in the same way you would add an email account.
I use Google Reader generally but when I want to keep up-to-date with something specific, I add the RSS feed to Outlook and it arrives in my inbox as if it was an email.
RSS isn't "push", which means that you need to have something that polls the website. It's much less traffic than getting the whole site or front page (for instance, you can say "Give me all articles newer than the last time I asked"), but it's traffic nonetheless.
It's generally understood you shouldn't have a refresh of more than 30 minutes in an automated client. (Citation required).
Having said that, you may find a client which allows you to set a more frequent refresh.
RSS2mail is a simple python script which I used extensively a few years back.
As Matthew stated you really shouldn't bother an RSS feed more than the producer allows but you can use http headers to check for changes in a very light way which is something rss2email does quite well.
You could always knock something up yourself... I've done it in the past and it really isn't too difficult a job to write an RSS parser.
Of course, as others have mentioned, there's an etiquette question as to how much of the website's valuable bandwidth you want to hog for yourself in RSS request traffic. That's a matter for your own conscience. ;)
Reading all the answers reminded me that I actually never looked into solving this using a Firefox add-on. I soon found Update Scanner and I think it look really promising!
I like an old version of feedreader for that kind of use, where the icon in the system tray started spinning when new stuff came in (the new version goes from grey to yellow instead).
it's also possible to be alerted for each new message.
I've used Pingie to send me an SMS when a new item appears in an RSS feed. Perhaps, it will be useful for you, if you have a cellphone text messaging plan.
I use RSS Bandit (for Windows) to stay up to date with my RSS feeds/blogs.
There are lots of other RSS aggregator applications though.
If you don't want another "big" application but have Windows Vista, you can also choose to make Internet Explorer monitor the RSS feed and use the Feed sidebar application (called "Feedschlagzeilen in German version, not sure about the English one) that comes with Vista to show the latest headlines.
Since you mentioned a pop-up, I'll add Feed Notifier to the list. It sits in the Windows Tray (or whatever they call it now in Windows 7) and pops up a notification when there are new entries to your feeds. You can set it up with multiple feeds, each with its own polling interval. When there are new entries, it pops up a prompt which you can dismiss or click to go to the entry. You are able to go back and review recent entries later, even if you clicked to dismiss them the first time. If your PC is asleep when a new entry is added, you will be notified the next time you wake it up.
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I have been searching for a solution to this problem for a while and surprised it doesn't exist. I have a low traffic site but a high conversion/acquisition cost per customer.
So when a customer hits a certain page on my website, I want to be notified via SMS. So I can instigate a live chat and get them converting.
I have tried an option with Google Analytics, but that seems to have a delay. The live chat platforms do not seem to have this feature.
How could this type of action be achieved?
David here, from the Zapier Platform team.
That certainly might be possible! I haven't tried anything like that, but I have an idea that might work (albeit with some caveats).
First, you'll want to trigger when someone is on the site. For that, I'd send a webbhook to Zapier from the front-end of the page. If you wanted to only trigger if someone is there for a few seconds (not a bounce) you can put the outgoing webhook in a setTimeout. If you have the following code:
fetch('https://hooks.zapier.com/my/hook/path')
It will contact Zapier. From there, you can use SMS by Zapier to text yourself. You could also pass along relevant data to be used in the text, if you wanted.
All that said, it seems like live-chat apps (something like Olark) will make it seem like you're online always and can forward incoming messages to you somewhere you can respond right away. I haven't tried any, but I can't imagine yours is a unique problem.
I am a huge fan of RSS.I am currently using Feedly as my default RSS Reader.I have a question though that I am unable to find the answer.How can I follow a website that does not provide RSS Feeds?I have tried several addons on firefox or extensions on chrome that automatically detect RSS when I am visiting a website,therefore with one-click I can add that website on Feedly.In addition I have searched through the internet to create manually an RSS Feed,when a website does not provide one,but it seems there is not a free way to do it,or if I try an online 'RSS Creator' (like page2rss and more) most of the times they are not working (either can't find the RSS of a website or create an invalid RSS).However,I didn't give up,so I was desperately seeking a way,to find the RSS Feed via the 'source code' of a website.Unfortunately,that only works for Youtube Channels and not for other websites.Is there a way via those actions to 'follow' another website?
I have found a way to 'detect changes' of Feed-less websites using update-scanner addon on firefox and page monitor on chrome.But,all I want to do is put those webpages in one app/website (like Feedly) so that I can follow them whether I am using my pc,or iphone/ipad (iOS),or tablet (android),or another user's pc/laptop.Any suggestions?Keep in mind that iOS devices don't support extensions.If I confused you,visit this link and you'll understand exactly what I am looking for.
http://googlereader.blogspot.gr/2010/01/follow-changes-to-any-website.html
The only drawback is that googleReader does not exist anymore!Do you know another RSS Reader that support this feature (like Feedly,the Old Reader etc) ?
Thanks!
A simple but basic solution is Page2Rss.com. You put the URL of the page. One's a day, the service crawl the page and generate an item for all what's new.
Feed43.com does a much better job, even its free version. You have to elaborate rules of extraction from the HTML code.
Feedity is much (much) more interactive, bit commercial.
I am not a developer, and I have been doing my best to get a response from SoundCloud, but it's taking a very long time (despite being a "pro" member) and I need to make a decision.
I am one of the beta SoundCloud podcasters. SoundCloud recommends that we use Feedburner to generate the RSS we submit to iTunes. However, my FeedBurner RSS has an issue (involving graphics) and I can't figure out how to edit the feed without killing it and starting anew there and with Apple.
In trying to figure out how to deal with Feedburner, I found the myriad of complaints and rumors suggesting Feednurner will soon be on the outs. I then tried going with a third party service (RapidFeeds) -- importing the (valid) SoundCloud RSS wasn't working there though, and customer support has not responded in 4 days of waiting. SoundCloud tech support says they have been having trouble with many of these 3rd party vendors.
So ... I'm back to either Feedburner -- which, unless I can figure out how to edit the feed -- means I'll kill it, redo it, and resubmit to Apple ... and face the uncertainty of whether it'll be around (with my subscribers) in a few months ...
OR
I could use the naked SoundCloud RSS -- which will definitely work with Apple -- but I will not be able to TAG the feed in any way, nor will I have any idea of subscriber stats. SoundCloud SAYS they plan to add tagging/other RSS functionality "in the next couple of months" ... but will they?
I could use your opinions on what to do. I need to make a decision quickly as I'm holding up a website launch for this. Thanks.
You didn't describe the actual problem you're having, or give your source and FeedBurner feed URLs, so my advice will be a little blind.
Login to FeedBurner, click on your feed, and go to the "Optimize" tab. Your podcast settings are under "SmartCast." If you're having trouble with your podcast cover art, then the "Image" field is what you need to change.
If this isn't your exact issue, please let us know more details.
Despite the potential doom of FeedBurner (I predict its retirement will be announced in 2013), you are right to use FeedBurner if you're using SoundCloud to host your podcast.
SoundCloud is not a podcasting service and it seems that they don't give you full freedom over your RSS feed. This is the lifeblood of your podcast. So using FeedBurner gives you a lot more control than SoundCloud's feed, but you're still sacrificing the control you would have of running your own website.
There is a blog, powered by Wordpress, which has valid RSS feed (opens up fine in Safari), but doesn't show new posts in Google Reader. In fact, the latest article from Google Reader is from Jul 21, 2010, while the latest article on the blog dates to Aug 19, 2010.
What should I do about the RSS feed (escape characters? modify XML or what?) for it to work on Google Reader?
This is a reopened question, because the original question I found was migrated to superuser, then closed there because it is best fitted on stackoverflow, so no solution was ever provided, and no chance was given to do so. Please give it a chance to get answered.
Update:
Google Reader pulls new articles, in groups of 10, and not the latest. For example if 12 (or 13, or 11) new articles are not shown in Google Reader, when the next one is added, the oldest 10 (exactly 10) of these articles appear on Google Reader, and the date shown in Google Reader is equal for each article, as if all 10 were published in the same second - the second they appeared on Google Reader. This problem doesn't manifest itself in other aggregators that I've tried.
Update 2:
Articles started showing up regularly, so the problem is solved, temporarily. Why did it happen I don't know, maybe it's because more readers subscribed (for testing purposes), or it's because of the PubSubHubBub plugin that I've added recently. Until it becomes clear, and for 3 more days, this question remains open.
I just added the blog to my Google Reader and had a bit of a play. I noticed the same behaviour you observed where I was missing the 5 most recent posts and a bunch of about 10 of them all had the same date:
After doing a bit of a search on the web, I found this post which explains how you can actually view the Published date via a tooltip on the right-hand side:
Then once I click the "Refresh" button from Google Reader at the top, the new posts showed up:
I believe that high volume blogs that are on the Google spiders' radar would be indexed every few hours and therefore all posts would have their Received date very close to the Published date so nobody notices/cares that it is actually displaying the Recevied date.
For low volume blogs however, it seems the cache is updated much less frequently. Google has some tips to try to get it to update - Feed not updating in Reader. Maybe my subscription to the blog updated the cache, but as the spider has a delay I didn't see the updates till pressing "Refresh". Or maybe the act of pressing the "Refresh" button triggered it to look for new posts immediately.
Lastly I subscribed the blog to my wife's Google Reader account and this time the 5 latest posts came up straight away with matching Received times which translated back to about the time when I pressed the "Refresh" button (or maybe it was when I added the feed).
I feel your pain - I agree that it all seems a bit cumbersome for a low volume RSS feed ...
You may also check with the blog author / hosting company and see if they have turned down the Google indexing rate. Google can create high volumes of traffic on a site. Turning down the indexing rate (crawl rate) will help with that but it b0rks Google Reader.
As other posters have mentioned, it could also be a factor of low popularity / low page rank / something else causing Googlebot to fail to crawl the blog frequently enough.
Google Reader display is dependent on Google crawling the blog to pick up the latest content. Realistically, you'll want a client side pull of the RSS feed to get the latest data so you aren't dependent on Google crawling the website. Outlook 2010, Firefox, many others exist. The client side software will directly pull the updated RSS feed from the blog, capturing the posts as they are published to the RSS feed.
Thank you for your responses, I too have come up with some possible solutions (thanks to you).
I don't know whether It's something I did, or independent of that, but as from yesterday (when you answered to this question), feeds started showing up normally.
Maybe it is due to the fact that thanks to you the blog got more subscribers on Google Reader and the Update Rate bounced (just like #Bermo suggested).
Or, maybe the introduction of the PubSubHubBub plugin changed something. But it's rather the first variant (number of subscribers). Though it is still a mystery why other extremely unpopular blogs give me regular articles in Google Reader.
For now I will only upvote good answers, until everything becomes clear (can't really determine the exact cause) or until the last day of this bounty.
I'd like to be able to collect RSS feeds online as an alternative to collecting them on a desktop machine using a regularly running process.
Ideally, it would either collect all feeds and simply email them to a single address as soon as it finds a new one (or even without checking for new feeds) or aggregates all the smaller feeds and sends them out as a bulk larger feed less periodically.
It would have to run on a web server continually, but would be a nice to be able to collect all feeds, not just the ones I happen to pick up when a feed reader is running on my machine. Is something like this available?
Just use Google Reader. :)
Google Reader.
Maybe Yahoo's Pipes could help you. It is an interesting way of combining and manipulating feeds.
I'm not sure if you have ever used it but iGoogle allows you to customise the google homepage to display information from around the web. You can add tabs to the page to allow you to split the information up. It's extremely useful and as you can log into it from any computer / browser you can access your feeds anywhere.
If you have a lot of feeds of one type or feeds that update infrequently then iGoogle can also be combined with google reader.
It's also great for adding other plugins like gmail, games, Dilbert :) and more.
To create an iGoogle page go to the google home page and click the iGoogle link in the top right corner. iGoogle will then provide you with a starter page and some suggested content which you can add or ignore. If you click the "Add Stuff" link then "Add feed or gadget" you can manually add all your RSS feeds. However, you can also configure Firefox to automatically select google as your RSS reader when ever you click on an RSS feed icon in the navigation bar. You can select / change this under Tools -> Options -> Applications -> Web Feed.
In order to use your iGoogle on multiple browsers / computers you will need a gmail / google account however it's free and easy to create.
T
simplepie is great if you have PHP installed.
Universal Feed Parser if you're programming in python might be of help