Using BSCW RSS news feeds
There are several ways that you can use RSS to keep track of what is going on in your BSCW workspaces: using one or more of the available news aggregators or using the features of current Web browsers to directly read RSS news feeds. In any case, BSCW RSS news feeds must be activated on your BSCW server. If in doubt, ask your system administrator about configuration details.
BSCW RSS news feed addresses
To find out the address of the BSCW RSS news feed on the events in a certain folder, you proceed as follows:
• Set your level of proficiency to Expert via if necessary; otherwise the following action will not be available.
• Navigate to the folder the events of which you are interested in. If you are, e.g., interested in a news feed on incoming tasks, open your task list.
Figure 27: View RSS events
•
Choose
to render an RSS news channel of all recent BSCW events which have happened in
the current folder. As a result, your browser displays RSS (XML) formatted
output. Some current Web browsers like Opera 9.0 detect the RSS format
automatically and will not present plain XML, but will present the BSCW events
in a format like a news reader.
• Your browser’s URL field will now contain the address of the BSCW RSS news feed concerning the events of the current folder (to be copied into whatever RSS news aggregator you prefer, see below).
Adding a BSCW news feed to a news aggregator
• Start
your preferred news aggregator, add a new news feed (sometimes called ‘news
channel’) and enter the address of a BSCW RSS news feed
http://your-bscw-server/bscw/bscw.cgi/folder-id?op=rss
into the new feed’s or channel’s location field. If you do not know the
server address or id of the folder whose events you are interested in, proceed
as above and copy the correct URL from the URL field of your browser.
• Give a proper name to the BSCW news feed and tell your aggregator how often it should poll BSCW for new events.
Your news aggregator will ask you for authentication when it polls BSCW for new events. Please note that not all news aggregators feature authentication and thus cannot be used to read BSCW RSS event news. The following readers are just examples of authentication compliant aggregators: Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0, Firefox 2.0, Internet Explorer 7.0, Opera 9.0 and FeedReader 2.0.
Note: Not all news aggregators look alike or work alike, some even do not work very well at all. So some aggregators may have difficulties in displaying BSCW RSS news feed events. Check for latest updates from time to time or just try another news aggregator.
‘Live Bookmarks’ in your browser
Current browsers like FireFox 2.0, Safari 2.0, Opera 9.0 and Internet Explorer 7.0 detect BSCW’s RSS capabilities and display an according RSS icon. With FireFox, Safari and Opera this is an RSS icon at the right end of the URL address field. In the Internet Explorer the Feeds button, located on the Internet Explorer toolbar, will change from gray to orange and it will play a sound. Click on the RSS icon and follow the browser instructions.
With FireFox, a ‘Live Bookmark’ for the BSCW RSS news feed will be created. Opera will directly open BSCW RSS news feeds in a separate tab. Check with your browser’s online help for details.