You love Zephyr, and you also like staying on top of things using RSS feeds. Why not combine the two, for the best of both worlds? Enter the SIPB RSS-Zephyr Service, a service that sends Zephyrs to a given Zephyr class and instance when new items become available in an RSS feed.
2020-04-24
asedeno is
taking over management of rssZephyr. It's moving to its own
locker, /mit/rss-zephyr, and starting over on feeds.
2008-06-21
Now uses write-ahead-logging, a SQL backend,
support for eTags, handles errors better, and sets a reasonable
user agent. Maybe there will be a web interface someday.
2005-04-22
I hope to write a much better version of
something like this over the summer. Until then, the current code gets
the job done reasonably well.
To add an RSS feed, edit
/afs/sipb.mit.edu/project/rss-zephyr/feedsToPoll/feeds
and add your RSS feed and information there. In the file, you need to
specify the URL of the RSS feed, how frequently to poll the URL for
changes, and where (i.e. Zephyr class and instance) you want the feed
sent when updates occur.
Here is a sample entry that you might add to the file, if you wanted
to poll Slashdot every hour, and send a Zephyr to class
wdaher-test, instance rss every time
something new happens:
http://www.slashdot.org/index.rss,wdaher-test,rss,60
Q: Your zephyr bot is sending hundreds of zephyrs every five
minutes to a zephyr class, and I think it's probably broken. How can I
disable it until it is fixed?
A: Yeah, sometimes things go wrong like that. If this ends up
being the case, open up the feeds file
(/afs/sipb.mit.edu/project/rss-zephyr/feedsToPoll/feeds). In
the file, there should be a line that says # STOP. Remove
the hash mark (#) from before the word STOP,
and the Zephyr bot will stop sending zephyrs. If you do this, though,
please email me so that I can fix the problem; stopping the Zephyr bot
stops it for everyone.
Q: How can I contact you?
A: email to sipb-zephyrss@mit.edu or a Zephyr to
asedeno are probably the best ways to reach me.