Monitor a specific RSS

Question

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 as soon as when they get updated (say for example a RSS feed for a forum I like to monitor and respond to as quick as possible).

Are there any tools out there for this kind of monitoring and that has some kind of alert functionality (a prompt window for example)?

I've tried Simbolic RSS Alert but I found it a bit buggy and couldn't get it to alert my as often as I liked.

Suggestions? Different experience of Simbolic?

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

I've used Pingie in the past to send me an SMS when a new items appears in an RSS feed. Perhaps that would be useful for you if you have a cell phone text messaging plan.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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. ;)

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

ZombieSheep said

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. ;)

Not really the RSS specification lists ttl as a tag for Time to Live which specifies the minimum time the producer would like to see between refreshes. While very few sites will chase you down for hitting the document every 30 mins instead of 45 it's quite possible to see cases where using a piece of badly thought out software could be considered a denial of service attack.

Answer 7

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 could 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.

Answer 8

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!

Answer 9

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.