Good news ahead for all the people who don’t like forums in general, but still want to know what’s going on.
The Feed option has been available for a while and makes it possible to create personalized newsfeeds to follow specific forums and subforums. That’s nice, but sometimes it’s not enough.
If you follow Planet KDE you might have heard about the recent improvements on forum.kde.org, including the better search system. It’s faster, it allows you to search for common words (such as ‘kde’) and it offers more options to give more accurate results. However, that’s not all. Now it’s also possible to display the results as a newsfeed, which means that you can make highly customized feeds with posts that you’re interested in.
Below I’ll show you have to make such a feed with an example. If you want to play around with it yourself, head to Search.
Update October 10, 2009: Feed has been removed. You can use Search to archive the same thing.
Creating a customized feed
In this example we want a newsfeed for new ideas in Brainstorm that are tagged ‘plasma’. An idea is simply a topic in the Brainstorm forum, and using the tag system we can find Plasma-related ideas that don’t necessary have the word ‘plasma’ in their title or description.
- Go to the
Search page.
- Search Query
Enterplasma
in the tags textbox. You can enter multiple tags if you want, just remember to separate them with commas (tag1,tag2,tag3
). - Search Options
SelectKDE Brainstorm
in the list. You can select multiple forums by dragging, or clicking on the items while holding downCtrl
. We don’t want to search in subforums, so chooseNo
forSearch subforums
.
To only search for ideas (and not their comments), we chooseFirst post of topics only
inSearch within
. This may seem strange, but don’t worry – this will hopefully be fixed in a not too distant future. - Display Options
In this example we don’t need to change any settings in this section. For now onlySort results by
andLimit results to previous
work for feeds. - RSS Options
Finally! Choose the feed format you prefer (for exampleRSS 2.0
) and a Style (HTML
is fine if you’re unsure). You’re finished with the search options – hit theSearch
button. - Add feed to your feed reader
Now you just have to copy the URL and use it to create a new feed in your feed reader (for example Akregator).
Your feed reader will handle the rest, and you can stay up-to-date without visiting the forums.
By now, you should have a fairly clear idea of how to make your own custom newsfeed using the new search features. There are more plans to bring the KDE Community Forums closer to the desktop – hope you like it!
November 30, 2009 at 21:31
Note that for feeds, you do not need to enter any keywords, author names or tags. In this mode a plain feed like listing of the selected forums is generated.
April 5, 2010 at 8:20
Thank you very much! It is the first forum with a configurable feed option! I love KDE!
April 19, 2010 at 23:43
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