The lazy geek’s way to instant alerts – for anything!
We’ve all been there – something vitally important (!1!!) has gone belly-up and we need answers – fast. It just so happens there’s a discussion forum where we can ask for help. You’ve registered, made a gigantic post detailing every single aspect of the problem that you are aware of and now you are waiting for those replies to start rolling in.
Except well, you have no way of knowing the minute a reply actually comes. Sure, you could activate the option to have an email sent to you whenever someone posts a reply, the problem is – you used your “spam” account (the one you never bother to check remember?) or worse, you used a throwaway email account (10 minute mail, guerilla email to name just two).
If only there was a way where you could get information pushed to your desktop whenever a page was updated… oh yeah, how about RSS? Slick new Web2.0 style forums such as Get Satisfaction do offer RSS feeds for each thread and several plugins are available for phpBB (the grand-daddy of forum software) that add RSS support, but it isn’t a given.
Enter page2rss.com. page2rss is a simple idea – scrape a given URL and any time the page changes, update an RSS feed with an excerpt of that changes. So, you take the URL of your forum thread, plug it into page2rss.com and voila! instant RSS feed.
Obviously this isn’t perfect, but we’ll take about caveats later.
So, we’ve solved the big problem – we now have an RSS feed that will instantly get updated whenever our vitally important forum thread changes.
Except, well 2 things:
1. You might not leave your feed-reader running all day, so how do you find out when that RSS feed updates?
Yes I know you might be of those lucky folks who can live in their browser all day and refresh their feed reader every 30 seconds. The above applies to not so lucky folks (like me)
2. Cluttering up your feed list with one time feeds that you have to remember to unsubscribe from later can get pretty annoying.
So now what we need is a service that can read an RSS feed and alert us whenever the feed updates. Also, we should be able to quickly unsubscribe from that feed once it has served its purpose. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you – FeedCrier.
Feedcrier provides an IM based RSS alert service. You add Feedcrier to your contacts list, give it a list of feeds to monitor and whenever a feed updates, you get an alert.
If you use the FeedCrier bot on Google Talk and you log IM conversations in your Gmail account, there’s another benefit – you could log off Google Talk and if FeedCrier updates when you are offline, it appears in your Gmail Inbox as a saved conversation – awesome! 😀
So there you have it – between Page2RSS and FeedCrier, you can set up a system that alerts you to changes on any page you are interested in and know whenever it happens in your email or in your IM client – what’s not to love about this?
A couple of things:
1. Page2RSS is after all a site scraper. This means it doesn’t distinguish between the main content of the page changing and a change in the footer text. A typical example – most forum threads list the number of registered users on the forum. Every time this number changes, Page2RSS will update the RSS feed for the page. On a popular forum, be prepared for lots of spurious updates.
2. FeedCrier isn’t a 100% stable – I’ve had it disappear from my IM client for a couple of days at a time and at other times, get incredibly slow at responding to any commands I type in. This could be because I use a non-standard Google Talk client but YMMV.