Who Says Penguins Can't Fly?

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.

1. Go to the Search page.
2. Search Query
   Enter plasma in the tags textbox. You can enter multiple tags if you want, just remember to separate them with commas (tag1,tag2,tag3).
3. Search Options
   Select KDE Brainstorm in the list. You can select multiple forums by dragging, or clicking on the items while holding down Ctrl. We don’t want to search in subforums, so choose No for Search subforums.
   To only search for ideas (and not their comments), we choose First post of topics only in Search within. This may seem strange, but don’t worry – this will hopefully be fixed in a not too distant future.
4. Display Options
   In this example we don’t need to change any settings in this section. For now only Sort results by and Limit results to previous work for feeds.
5. RSS Options
   Finally! Choose the feed format you prefer (for example RSS 2.0) and a Style (HTML is fine if you’re unsure). You’re finished with the search options – hit the Search button.
6. 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).

Adding a feed to your feed reader

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!