Customizing reading of the Worm Community Forum
If you do not wish to read the Worm Community Forum in a Web Browser,
there are two ways to obtain information in a customized way.
Email Notification
As a registered user, you can click the “Notify” button when viewing particular boards or topics.
Then you will receive an email notification, if something gets posted in that board or topic.
The email will initially not contain the contents of the post, just that something has been posted.
However, you have the possibility to change a setting in your user profile that will allow you
to see the text of the post.
Go into your “Profile”, choose “Notifications and Email” under the “Modify Profile”.
Click the checkbox for “When sending notification of a reply to a topic, send the post in the email”. Save your settings.
Now the boards/topics you subscribe to with “Notify” will email you the post. CAVEAT: Do not reply to these emails as all emails
will just go to Todd Harris. Instead, use the Forum to reply, if you would like to reply.
RSS
Using RSS works works well with, e.g. Safari Version 2, or with Firefox version 2. If you are on the Forum web site,
just click the RSS button in the URL line of Safari or Firefox, and you will see the RSS feed. You get the headlines,
with the slider in Safari you can adjust how much to see of the text of each post, and there is a link the read the full post.
You can also sort and search easily. Just bookmark the RSS feed to use it. At present SMF has a default limit to view the 5 last posts.
However, you can also set the default number of recent posts personally to any number of posts you like. Do it like this:
The normal RSS feed URL looks like this:
http://www.wormbase.org/forums/index.php?type=rss;action=.xml
Now, just insert the following into the URL: limit=20; (or 30, 50, any desired number)
http://www.wormbase.org/forums/index.php?type=rss;limit=20;action=.xml
Now you will see the 20 last posts.
In a similar way, you can specify only particular boards that you would like to see.
By adding “board=38.0;” into the URL, you only get topics in that board in the RSS.
http://www.wormbase.org/forums/index.php?board=38.0;type=rss;limit=20;action=.xml
To find out which board number a particular board has, just click on it in the Web browser, and it be displayed
in the URL.
To aggregate a number of different boards into a single RSS feed, you can use for example “Google Reader” (reader.google.com).
There you can collect a number of different feeds into a single news source. For example you can aggregate these two boards:
http://www.wormbase.org/forums/index.php?board=38.0;type=rss;limit=20;action=.xml
http://www.wormbase.org/forums/index.php?board=26.0;type=rss;limit=20;action=.xml
An example of a Google Reader View is appended.
Enjoy! 