topic Re: Brief Guide: How to subscribe to a community area (e.g. Announcements) with an RSS reader in Get Support

Brief Guide: How to subscribe to a community area (e.g. Announcements) with an RSS reader

srlawren — Wed, 05 Jan 2022 06:49:30 GMT

Hi community,

Some people have asked to be notified when promo plans or plan offering changes are announced. [EDIT: most recent example, which is what motivated me to do post this guide.] That may or may not ever come to fruition [edit: I can't spell "fruition" lol], so in the meantime, here's a brief guide on how you can subscribe to the RSS feed and check for new postings via an RSS reader.

Notes:

A) My screen shots are all from my phone, but you could do it from a computer virtually the same

B) I subscribe to Feedly as an RSS service to aggregate all my various feeds. There are others as well. You can buy premium if you want but the free basic works fine for my needs to date. The premium is expensive. I think there are other alternative services if you don't like Feedly.

C) The RSS Reader (Feedly client) app I've already been using for ages is FeedMe for Android. There are others on the play store, such as the official Feedly app (I still prefer FeedMe), and I'm 100% sure there are iOS RSS/Feedly clients as well.

D) This technique only shows you new postings, it doesn't show any of the replies/comments or notify you when new replies/comments are added.

Here are the steps:

1) browse to the community and open up the are you want to subscribe to... Disucssions, Public Lab, etc. This example is for Announcements, since it's often asked about. Find the Options menu at the top of the listing and open the menu:

2) If you're on your phone, tap on Subscribe to RSS Feed to get and then on Copy URL.

OR, if you're on a computer, then right-click on the Subscribe to RSS Feed (purple box below) and regular-click on Copy link address or Copy link location (green box below)

This puts the feed URL into your clipboard.

3) Open up your chosen Feedly/RSS client app or site and go into the Subscriptions management. For FeedMe, for example, you tap the "hamburger" icon at the top left to open the flyout menu, and then tap Subsciption, and then the "+" icon in the lower right of the screen. Paste in the URL form your clipboard to search for the feed:

4) Tap or click on the Announcements topics in the search results to add it. Your app may ask you put the feed into a category. For me, I have a few defined already so added it to my "Mobile Misc" category, but you can always create a new one or probably put it in the default category. Here's my example:

5) That's it! You can now browse to the feed along with any of your other feeds (if you have any) and see the 10 most recent topics at any time:

6) Tapping on a particular preview will open up the full posting to read. Most client apps have features for moving between articles, marking them read or unread, "favouriting" ones you want to preserve, and so on. Here's a couple of articles from the feed currently:

7) Most readers have an optional feature to open up the link into your browser to read the whole thing along with replies and so on.

😎 Optional step for nerds like me: most Android apps now open web links inside an embedded browser window in the app. You may be fine with that, but if you're like me and always want it to open in Chrome (or your default browser), you may need to hunt down the app settings that controls it. For FeedMe, there's a Browser checkbox. If it's checked, it opens inside FeedMe, but if unchecked, uses Chrome. Your mileage may vary. 😉

The end. Hopefully this helps get you started! Cheers.

Re: Brief Guide: How to subscribe to a community area (e.g. Announcements) with an RSS reader

SD08 — Fri, 10 Mar 2017 18:50:08 GMT

Well done sir!

It's too bad there isn't a superbravo button that we could hit for posts like this.

Re: Brief Guide: How to subscribe to a community area (e.g. Announcements) with an RSS reader

srlawren — Fri, 10 Mar 2017 18:53:19 GMT

@SD08 aww, shucks! Thanks for the kind words. I like doing stuff like this, so happy to contribute.

Re: Brief Guide: How to subscribe to a community area (e.g. Announcements) with an RSS reader

Shazia_K — Fri, 10 Mar 2017 19:06:01 GMT

@srlawren,

Like always, well done! 😄

Thanks for contributing, Scott!

Re: Brief Guide: How to subscribe to a community area (e.g. Announcements) with an RSS reader

NDesai — Fri, 10 Mar 2017 19:05:54 GMT

Thanks srlawren for taking your time for this helpful post.

Re: Brief Guide: How to subscribe to a community area (e.g. Announcements) with an RSS reader

NDesai — Fri, 10 Mar 2017 19:17:13 GMT

@srlawren Does that app give you notification when there is a new post? Similar to email notifications? Or we have to open the app to see if there is any new post.

BTW, You should submit this as an article so it would be listed in the knowledge base.

Re: Brief Guide: How to subscribe to a community area (e.g. Announcements) with an RSS reader

srlawren — Fri, 10 Mar 2017 20:03:38 GMT

@NDesai it all depends on the RSS / Feedly client you use and how you configure it. Most allow you to set how often a feed is automatically refreshed for you, or you can choose to set it manually.

For example, here are the options for syncing in FeedMe:

You could probably also configure it to notify you upon new articles, though I don't use that personally. I do however use TeslaUnread with my Nova Launcher Prime launcher and can easily see the number of articles I haven't marked as read on the app icon, as seen here:

Your mileage may vary!

Re: Brief Guide: How to subscribe to a community area (e.g. Announcements) with an RSS reader

NDesai — Fri, 10 Mar 2017 20:31:32 GMT

@srlawren Thanks. That's what I was looking for as it wasn't mentioned in the main post.

Re: Brief Guide: How to subscribe to a community area (e.g. Announcements) with an RSS reader

srlawren — Fri, 10 Mar 2017 20:59:46 GMT

Okay so here's a further thought.

I noted originally that when you subscribe to a forum's RSS feed, you only get new postings, and not any comments or replies. What if you wanted to watch ONE particular posting for all replies as well or instead? You can!

Actually, the simplest way to do it is to use the regular Subscribe option, which then sends you email notifications anyone someone responds to that thread. But maybe your inbox is overflowing and you dislike that option and instead want to be able to check your RSS reader app for replies instead. You can.

Threads each have an RSS feed URL too.

So you can do something like this:

And then paste that URL into your read app like in step 3 of the original guide. For example, here are all the replies to this thread, shown in my FeedMe app:

EDIT: admittedly, this is probably not an especially useful usage, since as I noted you could very easily subscribe for email updates instead. Also, you have to know which specific thread(s) you want to track. But you never know, someone might want it.

Re: Brief Guide: How to subscribe to a community area (e.g. Announcements) with an RSS reader

zhadj030 — Fri, 10 Mar 2017 20:58:14 GMT

I always wondered on how to use those. Super post and big thanks, Bookmarked for further reading during the weekend.

Re: Brief Guide: How to subscribe to a community area (e.g. Announcements) with an RSS reader

srlawren — Fri, 10 Mar 2017 20:58:44 GMT

Thanks for the kind words, @zhadj030

Re: Brief Guide: How to subscribe to a community area (e.g. Announcements) with an RSS reader

stonechucker — Fri, 10 Mar 2017 22:07:24 GMT

@srlawren You have been busy today 🙂

thanks for picking king up on this. I'm astonished at the documentation you have provided, and now see how easy it is to setup. I should have gotten into RSS feeds sooner.

We are a community full of people with various talents, I am so happy to be here to help, and learn myself everyday.

Re: Brief Guide: How to subscribe to a community area (e.g. Announcements) with an RSS reader

ShawnC13 — Fri, 10 Mar 2017 22:21:43 GMT

Great post!! Thanks for taking the time to put this all together.

Re: Brief Guide: How to subscribe to a community area (e.g. Announcements) with an RSS reader

RM4 — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 17:06:28 GMT

This did get me started thank you. The process was a little different with the iphone. First time I've ever tried to subscribe to an RSS. Kept defaulting me to the apple news app and that didn't work. I found I needed to copy (by holding down) and past into a RSS feed app that I found in the app store, I'm using CSmart. Now it's working great.

Re: Brief Guide: How to subscribe to a community area (e.g. Announcements) with an RSS reader

srlawren — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 17:51:32 GMT

@RM4 wrote:
This did get me started thank you. The process was a little different with the iphone. First time I've ever tried to subscribe to an RSS. Kept defaulting me to the apple news app and that didn't work. I found I needed to copy (by holding down) and past into a RSS feed app that I found in the app store, I'm using CSmart. Now it's working great.

@RM4 thanks for this feedback! Good to know there's an iPhone app that works with this technique. (Well, any RSS app should, but I have no first-hand experience with iOS, so this is helpful!)

Re: Brief Guide: How to subscribe to a community area (e.g. Announcements) with an RSS reader

RM4 — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 18:03:03 GMT

Yes, I’d assume any rss feed app would work. Apple news just didn’t work for me and I think that’s the default for rss. I could totally be wrong tho I’m a newbie.