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

srlawren
Retired Oracle / Oracle Retraité

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:

 

Screenshot_20170310-082804.png

 

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

 

Screenshot_20170310-082830.png

 

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)

 

SubsciptionURLChrome.png

 

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:

 

Screenshot_20170310-082916.png

 

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:

 

Screenshot_20170310-082932.png

 

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:

 

Screenshot_20170310-082958.png

 

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:

 

Screenshot_20170310-083015.png

Screenshot_20170310-083036.png

 

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.  

 

Screenshot_20170310-103343.png

 

😎 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.  😉

 

Screenshot_20170310-103422.png

 

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


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15 REPLIES 15

RM4
Good Citizen / Bon Citoyen

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. 

srlawren
Retired Oracle / Oracle Retraité

@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!)


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RM4
Good Citizen / Bon Citoyen

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.  

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

 

 


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@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.

srlawren
Retired Oracle / Oracle Retraité

Thanks for the kind words, @zhadj030


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zhadj030
Mayor / Maire

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

 

srlawren
Retired Oracle / Oracle Retraité

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:

 

PostingRSSFeed.png

 

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:

 

Screenshot_20170310-124911.png

 

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.


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

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srlawren
Retired Oracle / Oracle Retraité

@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:

 

Screenshot_20170310-115854.pngScreenshot_20170310-115848.png

 

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:

 

Screenshot_20170310-115832.png

 

Your mileage may vary!


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@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.

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Thanks srlawren for taking your time for this helpful post.

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Shazia_K
Retraité / Retired
Retraité / Retired

@srlawren

 

Like always, well done! 😄 Heart 

 

Thanks for contributing, Scott!

 

 

 

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srlawren
Retired Oracle / Oracle Retraité

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


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SD08
Retired Oracle / Oracle Retraité

Well done sir!

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

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