Unobtrusive real-time notifications of new RSS entries

Question

First, why am I asking: StackOverflow's reputation points now have real value (you can spend them on damn good answers by offering rewards). I would like to keep track of the questions that I could answer and pounce on them! (Also, the fact that others answer my questions in real time makes StackOverflow surprisingly convenient, so it would be nice to reciprocate.)

To ask this as a more general non-StackOverflow question:

• What kind of delay will usually be in the RSS feed, and not on polling and cleaning?
• What's a good way to display notifications in a not too distracting way, like Growl on Mac? (It should also be easy to turn on and off if it is too distracting.)

(Or, for the StackOverflow dependencies, what is your setup for raising new questions and can you generalize it to monitor other web content in real time?)

Answer 1

What will be the delay typically in RSS feeds or polls and scraping?

It depends on what kind of caching the site uses for its RSS feed. There is no noticeable delay in SO for most channels, but you will need to poll the channel every minute or so. The program cannot automatically receive notifications from the site itself, unless a kind of ping service exists on the site.

Answer 2

You can use the notify.me service as a slightly more intrusive version of an RSS reader. It controls the feed and sends you email alerts. But with the basic setup of StackOverflow, you would probably be stunned by notifications, even if there were only “generous questions” feeds, because there are a lot of reward offers per day.

So maybe combine this with Yahoo Pipes and create a filtered subset based on information that contains only topics that interest you. Each entry in the SO RSS feed has a “category” node that contains all its tags, and Pipes will allow you to create AND / OR / NOT expressions based on these categories. (and I don't know what other attributes can be set?)

Even if you don’t want to receive pop-up notifications via email, the Pipes solution allows you to keep track of what you want in the RSS feed. I would suggest that you see about an hour or two lags, though.

Answer 3

Regarding question number 1:

Keep it as short as possible. If everything you use to load correctly supports ETags and HTTP Cache-Control , then everything should be fine. If you control both the server and the client, checking out Delta Encoding ( RFC 3229 ) would be a good idea.

Answer 4

Roll up the open source reader to turn on / off the scroll lock LED.

Answer 5

you can use tcp-style rollback to handle feed polling. The more often someone posts, the more often you conduct a survey.

Google Reader does this; the more I post on my blog, the faster each post appears.

Answer 6

I am experimenting with Feed Notifier for this purpose.

http://www.feednotifier.com/

I still can't pounce, as I will get my pop-ups a few minutes later. At this point, they already have 30 viewers, 3 answers, etc.

Therefore, I would like to see the answer to the secondary question ....

Answer 7

Vienna RSS Reader for Mac shows Growl notifications, but only forms of "X new posts" and not very real time.

Answer 8

VibeFire is a decent solution for this. It will read RSS feeds and pop up notifications (which will automatically disappear if you don't read them). http://vibefire.com if you are interested. Its a complete installer, though, but it will not install anything that you do not accept.