RSS Feeds Now Available

[Pete]

I've enabled RSS Feeds in the Forum, so you can get the Active Topics on V-Flyer automatically feed to your RSS-capable newsreader. For Firefox users, if you click the little orange icon in the footer bar, you can add the active newsfeed to your bookmarks.

I'll also be adding RSS feeds from the main site shortly, which will be the latest news (rather than active posts), so you'll have a selection of RSS feeds to choose from

Pix

[Nottingham Nick]

Thanks Pix,

There are now at least 149 different extensions you can use to customise Firefox. It is a fantastic browser, that keeps on getting better.

:D

Nick

[Nottingham Nick]

Pete

I am getting a couple of error messages.

First when I click on the botton left icon:

This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.

Second an intermittent error message box on screen:

error Get rss:Type error: gXMLHttpRequest.abortisnotafunction

I don't know if I haven't installed it properly, or if it is an error 'your end'

Nick

[Pete]

Sounds like you're clicking on the raw feed icons (the XML/RSS icons at the bottom of the page). To get Firefox to automatically build a dynamic menu of the latest news items and/or active posts, you should see an little orange icon on the footer bar of the browser window (not on the page itself) which looks like a little transmission logo. That will add a 'live bookmark'.

Alternatively, if you haven't got an advanced browser like Firefox , you can use any RSS Reader and paste in the URL of the raw feed (the page linked from the XML/RSS icons).

There are now two seperate feeds. The one in the forum gives you the current active topics, and the one in the main site gives you the latest news. The source of the feeds are;

http://www.v-flyer.com/rssfeed.asp (News)
http://www.v-flyer.com/forum/rssfeed.asp (Active Topics)

Pix

Pix,
Firefox has put on my left hand bookmarks table a V-Flyer forums folder with the active topics in it. I take it this is what is supposed to happen?
TIA

[Pete]

Sounds right (although since I'm on a Mac, Firefox has put it in a different place). That menu should be 'live', so the active topics will automatically updated.

Pix

I've added the RSS feed as a live menu off the Bookmarks Toolbar which runs horizontally above the tab bar. But I suspect it's position can vary as this is a highly customisable, flexible and advanced browser .

BTW, my live bookmarks icon isn't orange, its kind of blue, red and yellow! I'm using version 1.0 on WinXP.

[honey lamb]

Ahem! Excuse my ignorance, but what are RSS feeds?

[Pete]

At its basic level, RSS is a technology used for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, however it's effectively just a way of structuring a document to a prescribed standard, it means it can be used in all sorts of ways.

Without getting too technical, the 'RSS feed' is just a text document which is marked up to identify the headlines, description and link to the main story. In the 'syndicated news' model, this would allow another website to take a news feed and display it on their site. Alternatively, if you have an RSS Newsreader application, you can go and select news sources (such as from newspapers or manufacturer sites like Apple, etc) and display your own customised news page. Some applications display this news feed in 'tickers', like the stock exchange, in a floating banner on your screen (therefore, you'll be able to add the latest posts in the forum to those tickers, by selecting the feed from V-Flyer).

Firefox takes advantage of the RSS spec by using 'Live Bookmarks' - just like a normal bookmark, but they update the specific links to those in the feed.

No doubt there are, and there will be, many other uses for RSS feeds in the future too.

Pix