Two suggestions - RSS and announcement subjects

1. If the announcements (both service and technical) could be made available in an RSS v 2 format that would help to track changes. In addition the RSS format would allow reading of the info in a wider variety of formats in addition to browsers. Since RSS is simply an XML file it can be programmatically deconstructed and fed into an information flow scheme.

2. When an announcement is made, it would be helpful if all the servers involved could be mentioned in the subject. Recently I missed an announcement since one server was mentioned in the subject, but another server (which was affected and mentioned in the body of the message) was not included in the subject.

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 7017

Hi,

1. We can look into this, depending on demand.

2. Which announcement was this?

Thanks,

Andrew

[30/01/09] RAM upgrades and Neptune work

[30/01/09] RAM upgrades and Neptune work

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 7017

Thanks. It's sometimes hard to fit all the relevant servers in the title due to length restrictions. However in this case I believe I could have fitted them all in without issue, apologies for this.

Thanks,

Andrew

Posted: Thu Feb 26, 2009 5:44 pm Post subject:

No problem Andrew, it was not a big issue. One of the things we try to do to be better than others is to forestall issues with our customers. Reading your announcements is a definite advantage, thanks.

If your forum titles are restricted in length then the RSS XML format would be less restrictive in this sense. Also, the format allows multiple contexts (separate from the subject) to be enumerated which could contain server detail. Intelligent engines could then search for feeds which specify a particular server name.

I'm sure other users will chip in on this discussion if they feel strongly (or otherwise) that RSS feeds would be an advantage. It's not a big deal to write a short PHP script that would generate an XML feed, and to my mind is an excellent way of getting small nuggets of very important information.

NetHosted Staff Joined: 24 Jun 2005 Posts: 1021

Hi,

As a follow up to this, RSS feeds are now available for all of our forums. These can be viewed using URL's in the form of:

NetHosted Staff Joined: 24 Jun 2005 Posts: 1021

Another feature I forgot to mention, you can limit this to new topics only instead of all posts by adding the t=1 option.

For example:

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 7017

Further to this I've now added some rewrite rules to make this easier for all to subscribe e.g.

Posted: Fri Feb 27, 2009 7:14 pm Post subject:

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 7017

Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2009 1:28 pm Post subject:

Thanks to the NH guys for implementing this.
My reason for the request was to make the information available in other ways. Since we learn and advance by standing on the shoulders of others, here for your entertainment and edification is the result of using Andrew and Darryl's RSS feed from 'tech announcements' using a voice dialog manager. The file is in ogg vorbis format (open source audio) and is about 1 MB in size.

http://www.it4gh.com/halstuf/nh1.ogg

This result is not easily obtained directly from the RSS XML. Much of the information coded into the XML RSS fields does not conform to XML standards and has to be massaged and worked around in order to make it just plain text. However it is not difficult to do the string substitutions to get the result you need.

This new RSS facility is a small step towards the semantic web that we know will help but seem to be reluctant to embrace wholeheartedly. Well done A & D, your service is suddenly quite a lot more "accessible"!.

Now someone should stand on my shoulders and make it even better, any takers?

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 7017

I'm struggling to see how to improve it, you have my voice reproduced perfectly as is!

On a more serious note this is all a bit Red Dwarf for me I must say. I have been known to have words with my various computers and machines but am yet to get a verbal response back...

Andrew

Posted: Fri Mar 06, 2009 12:01 pm Post subject:

Subscribed. Nice idea and addition - thanks.

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