Small Wars Council RSS Feed?

Hi,

I am researching aspects of irregular warfare and although I do not post much on the Small Wars Council I am a avid reader for the simple reason that the Small Wars community links to some great articles/books/materials I otherwise would have been ignorant to. In the last month I must have read 50-60 articles directly linked to or indirectly discussed on the forum. Thanks!

I was wondering if the Small Wars Council has an RSS feed so I could skim the new posts without digging through 4-5 forums.

Thanks

(Sorry if I posted this in the wrong forum)

Chris Albon
Graduate Student
Department of Political Science
University of California, Davis

Not at the moment, although I believe this may be in the works. You could also use the New Posts link in the top toolbar that should bring up any thread with new posts until such a feed becomes possible.

New Posts (top center of blue nav bar) and Recent Posts (top right) are the best ways to keep up with recent developments in the Small Wars Council. And the search feature works well when specific keywords apply.

For the rest of the SWJ, we are underway in transitioning to put all of the content in the Movable Type blog/content management system. RSS feeds, search, various views are a piece of that. More here.

For those web-well-endowed amongst us that know how to use these things, this link gets you a feed of recent posts via RSS 2 syndication.

NOTE: the RSS feed only has the permissions of an Unregistered User, so it will not feed posts from the Member's Only forums. You'll still have to come here and login for that.

Will add this and some other feed options to the site in more prominent locations when we've stabilized a few things.

Two requests....

1) Post any problems / insights with using the feed in this thread, or e-mail to webmaster@smallwarsjournal.com. Details would help - crystal ball is cloudy, foresight is sparse, your sitreps from the bleeding edge will allow us to improve.

2) If anyone has some tips and/or how-to links for our many users who can get it and might use this, but don't at the moment have a clue about this syndication / feed / reader stuff (like me :o), please post those here.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SWCAdmin

Two requests....

1) Post any problems / insights with using the feed in this thread, or e-mail to webmaster@smallwarsjournal.com. Details would help - crystal ball is cloudy, foresight is sparse, your sitreps from the bleeding edge will allow us to improve.

2) If anyone has some tips and/or how-to links for our many users who can get it and might use this, but don't at the moment have a clue about this syndication / feed / reader stuff (like me :o), please post those here.

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I'm new to the RSS stuff as well. I recently signed up and use Google Reader, and instead of using the link that was in the original post, I just did a search for feeds within Google Reader (click on "add subscription"), and the "smallwarsjournal.com" search turned up the "SWJ Blog" as the first hit and "Small Wars Council - Powered by vBulletin" as the fourth hit. The message board feed appears to just feed new threads (i.e., the first post in a thread), which is perfect. A feed with every comment would be too much. This took all of about two minutes to do.

I would recommend doing two other feeds:

1) A feed for blog comments. Where this would be helpful is for an older blog post where a new comment won't be seen since the blog is ordered by post date only.

2) If vBulletin supports, allow a subscription to a thread where instead of being emailed, it is sent via RSS.

I haven't explored all the potential of Google Reader, but one thing that is useful is that you can both star a particular post and put tags on it. Thus, it can be catalogued for future use instead of having to get the search words just right. Hope this helps.

If you open the link in your browser, most browsers have an option to subscribe to the feed as a bookmark. You'll get a folder that lists the most recent posts. This is a pretty basic implementation.

Dedicated RSS readers are more powerful but I haven't much experience with them.

List of Mac Readers

Windows RSS Readers

Thanks for the links, mmx1.

Shek, good ideas, thanks. Working. Some info....

The "lastpost=true" switch in the link (look at the URL for the feed) makes it a list of new posts instead of new threads. If you edit that out of the URL, or set it to false, you'll get an RSS feed of latest threads. Similar to what is behind the feed to our main page.

Re thread RSS -- hadn't gone there. From my testing so far, there's a way to RSS for individual forums. That's different from another approach with a similar net, RSS for the whole board and filter for certain forums (which show as categories in the default RSS feed) - available in the feed as it stands here. Working the kinks out of that and plan to make the forum-specific option available in an a la carte menu. Do you think that would be as useful, maybe better than thread-specific? From the little I know about RSS, it seems that subscibing to individual threads would clobber you with too many feeds after a while.

FYI, the feeds refreshes every 10 min, so you won't see things instantaneously.

Yes, syndication of blog comments. Feature is there, need to implement it, has been on the To Do list for a while.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Shek

I would recommend doing two other feeds:

1) A feed for blog comments. Where this would be helpful is for an older blog post where a new comment won't be seen since the blog is ordered by post date only.

2) If vBulletin supports, allow a subscription to a thread where instead of being emailed, it is sent via RSS.

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Shek, and all,

#1 is sort of there. The site home page, and the side bar of the blog main page, now have a feed of the 10 latest comments received.

Still in a bit of quest for fire mode w/ the related permutations of RSS.

See http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/200...l-bookmarking/ for an update on this issue.