There are several ways that you can use RSS to keep track of what is going on in your BSCW workspaces: using one or more of the available news aggregators or using the features of modern Web browsers to directly read RSS news feeds. In any case, BSCW RSS news feeds must be activated on your BSCW server. If in doubt, ask your system administrator about configuration details.

BSCW RSS news feed addresses

To find out the address of the BSCW RSS news feed on the events in a certain folder, you proceed as follows:

• Set your level of proficiency to ‘Expert’ (see 4.2.3.1) if necessary; otherwise the following action will not be available.
• Navigate to the folder the events of which you are interested in. If you are, e.g., interested in a news feed on incoming tasks, open your task list.



Figure 6.4-1: View RSS events

• Choose  View    Events  to render an XML formatted RSS news channel of all recent BSCW events which have happened in the current folder. As a result, your browser displays RSS (XML) formatted output. Some modern Web browsers like Opera 8.0 detect the RSS format automatically and will not present plain XML, but will present the BSCW events in a format like a news reader.
• Your browser’s URL field will now contain the address of the BSCW RSS news feed concerning the events of the current folder (to be copied into whatever RSS news aggregator you prefer, see below).

Adding a BSCW news feed to a news aggregator

• Start your preferred news aggregator, add a new news feed (sometimes called ‘news channel’) and enter the address of a BSCW RSS news feed

  http://your-bscw-server/bscw/bscw.cgi/folder-id?op=rss

  into the new feed’s or channel’s location field. If you do not know the server address or id of the folder whose events you are interested in, proceed as above and copy the correct URL from the URL field of your browser.
• Give a proper name to the BSCW news feed and tell your aggregator how often it should poll BSCW for new events.

Your news aggregator will ask you for authentication when it polls BSCW for new events. Please note that not all news aggregators feature authentication and thus cannot be used to read BSCW RSS event news.

Note:

Not all news aggregators look alike or work alike, some even do not work very well at all. So some aggregators may have difficulties in displaying BSCW RSS news feed events. Check for latest updates from time to time or just try another news aggregator.

‘Live Bookmarks’ in your browser

Modern browsers like FireFox 1, Opera 8, Safari 2 (Tiger) and Internet Explorer 7 detect BSCW’s RSS capabilities and display an according RSS icon: with FireFox this is an orange icon at the very right bottom of the window, with Safari and Opera it is a blue icon indicating RSS in the URL address field of the browser window. Click on these icons and follow the browser instructions.

With FireFox, a ‘Live Bookmark’ for the BSCW RSS news feed will be created. Opera will directly open BSCW RSS news feeds in a separate tab. Check with your browser’s online help for details.

If you choose not to use Live Bookmarks in FireFox, you can also install an RSS plug-in, e.g. SAGE or Wizz (visit http://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/ and search for RSS, SAGE or Wizz).