I feel like a moth dancing around the RSS flame right now… my gut tells me that in addition to all of its other uses, DevonAgent can be used as an RSS newsreader for sites I’d like to subscribe to (a few productivity blogs, the Devontech forums, etc.). However, I’ve been unable to find out how to do it in the manual, and there isn’t anything about it on the forums.
I’m still a novice, so I don’t understand all the power tricks yet. My instinct is to create an automated timed crawler, feed it the RSS URLs, and let it do it’s thing once every hour or two, but I can’t figure out how to do multiple sites with no specific search terms.
Is this possible? Am I approaching it the wrong way?
Interesting, I’ve been struggling with the same thing. I basically have a list of sites with environmental RSS newsfeeds that I’d like to have routinely checked, usually for all the feeds that are new but occasionally with a focussed search. I am still not satisfied with what I’ve accomplished but I keep thinking there must be a way to do it effectively and efficiently.
I’m certainly not an expert on RSS, and make only very simple uses.
First, both DEVONthink and DEVONagent built-in Web browsers can handle RSS feed URLs. I’ve bookmarked a small number of such URLs in DEVONthink, and generally access them just to see what’s new.
. Note that the last digits of the URL set the number of characters for a download. If you wished to see a complete thread with multiple postings, this could be changed from 1000 to 10000 (or whatever it takes).
Second, it’s possible to create a DA search set using one or more RSS feed URLs. I did a very simple one, creating a set I called DEVONtech user RSS. I simply pasted the user forum, RSS URL into the “Sites” area and set a default search for PDF. The set works – but of course there’s already an existing search set for the forum using a plugin.
I’m starting to ‘knowledge mine’ the DEVONtech user forum, both for user query response resources, and for information supporting new material on the Wiki site. Looks as though DA will be useful for those purposes.
Thanks for the response Bill. I already use DA to peruse the forum’s RSS feed, but I have to do it manually. What I’d like to do is be able to have DA crawl the feed at regular intervals without the need for a search term so that it shows any new entries that have been made.
This may become a moot point once Safari 2.0 comes out, but I’d still like to leverage DA’s more powerful search capabilities from time to time if I can.[/b]
Thanks, Eric. I wasn’t able to find this anywhere in the application help or documentation. This is a nice feature and even a brief overview DA’s wildcard capabilities would probably be very helpful. I had given up on DA and was waiting for the new version of Safari…
