Monitor a specific RSS

Question

For all the RSS feeds I subscribe to I use Google Reader, which I love. I do however have a couple of specific RSS feeds that I'd like to be notified of as soon as they get updated (say, for example, an RSS feed for a forum I like to monitor and respond to as quickly as possible).

Are there any tools out there for this kind of monitoring which also have some kind of alert functionality (for example, a prompt window)?

I've tried Simbolic RSS Alert but I found it a bit buggy and couldn't get it to alert me as often as I liked.

Suggestions? Or perhaps a different experience with Simbolic?

Answer 1

If you have access to Microsoft Outlook 2007 or Thunderbird, these email clients allow you to add RSS feeds in the same way you would add an email account.

I use Google Reader generally but when I want to keep up-to-date with something specific, I add the RSS feed to Outlook and it arrives in my inbox as if it was an email.

Answer 2

RSS isn't "push", which means that you need to have something that polls the website. It's much less traffic than getting the whole site or front page (for instance, you can say "Give me all articles newer than the last time I asked"), but it's traffic nonetheless.

It's generally understood you shouldn't have a refresh of more than 30 minutes in an automated client. (Citation required).

Having said that, you may find a client which allows you to set a more frequent refresh.

Answer 3

I've used Pingie in the past to send me an SMS when a new items appears in an RSS feed. Perhaps that would be useful for you if you have a cell phone text messaging plan.

Answer 4

RSS2mail is a simple python script which I used extensively a few years back.

As Matthew stated you really shouldn't bother an RSS feed more than the producer allows but you can use http headers to check for changes in a very light way which is something rss2email does quite well.

Answer 5

You could always knock something up yourself... I've done it in the past and it really isn't too difficult a job to write an RSS parser.

Of course, as others have mentioned, there's an etiquette question as to how much of the website's valuable bandwidth you want to hog for yourself in RSS request traffic. That's a matter for your own conscience. ;)

Answer 6

I use RSS Bandit (for Windows) to stay up to date with my RSS feeds/Blogs.

There are lots of other RSS aggregator applications, though.

If you don't want another "big" application, but have Windows Vista, you could also choose to make Internet Explorer monitor the RSS feed and use the Feed sidebar application (called "Feedschlagzeilen in German version, not sure about the English one) that comes with Vista to show the latest headlines.

Answer 7

Reading all the answers reminded me that I actually never looked into solving this using a Firefox add-on. I soon found Update Scanner and I think it look really promising!

Answer 8

I like an old version of feedreader for that kind of use, where the icon in the system tray started spinning when new stuff came in (the new version goes from grey to yellow instead).

it's also possible to be alerted for each new message.

Answer 9

Since you mentioned a pop-up, I'll add Feed Notifier to the list. It sits in the Windows Tray (or whatever they call it now in Windows 7) and pops up a notification when there are new entries to your feeds. You can set it up with multiple feeds, each with its own polling interval. When there are new entries, it pops up a prompt which you can dismiss or click to go to the entry. You are able to go back and review recent entries later, even if you clicked to dismiss them the first time. If your PC is asleep when a new entry is added, you are notified the next time you wake it up.