Thursday 26 September 2013

Reading forums via Email

This cropped up on the TFL email list, as some folks are much happier reading stuff in email than on a forum, so I hacked up a recipe for getting an email feed of a forum.

Go to https://blogtrottr.com/, put in your email address and the forum RSS feed address (http://toofatlardies.co.uk/forum/feed.php), and Bob's your uncle.

If you want a feed for a single forum, go to the forum, get its URL (say for the General forum http://toofatlardies.co.uk/forum/viewforum.php?f=18) and replace 'viewforum' with 'feed' (so http://toofatlardies.co.uk/forum/feed.php?f=18) and stick THAT in blogtrottr's form.

To reply, you'll need to create a forum account and do so on the forum, but that's unavoidable.
Obviously, this works just as well for any other forum with an RSS feed, but bear in mind that if you need to be logged in to read certain sub-forums, it almost certainly won't pick them up.

It's also worth noting that if you don't like the Blogtrottr adverts, other RSS to Email gateways are available. MailChimp, in particular, looks promising if you don't mind only getting a feed once per day. If you're code-savvy, it's not exactly difficult to hack one up for yourself in PHP or Perl, in fact.

1 comment:

  1. This was an excellent help. I now get digests of the TFL group and it is much easier to keep up with.

    Thanks

    ReplyDelete

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