Forum OpenACS Q&A: feedreader notifier

Posted by Ben Koot on 02/20/04 10:11 PM

Hi folks,

Is there a chance we will get a feedreader notifier, like used by bloglines? http://www.bloglines.com/about/notifier

I find it quite usefull even when using rss for blog updates, but the implications go further. It could be used for transmitting reservations and helpdeks messages in the future, so in that respect a notifier, bypassing e-mail would be very usefull. It would realy great to have this feature as an additional option in the notification functionality in Larsblogger

Just a thought

Cheers
Ben

2: Re: feedreader notifier (response to 1)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 02/21/04 07:29 AM

We would want to rewrite notifications to handle multiple destinations besides E-Mail (SMS, Notifier, RSS Channels, Jabber). But this is tedious work and therefore costly, currently without funding.

As for you specific notifier, I'm sure if we would know the format, we could just use the bloglines.com notifier and have users download it from there. As these are client applications a whole new set of skills come into play. Not sure if someone would want to delve into this from our community, but it might be a nice project for students that are not so keen on working with the internals of OpenACS.

3: Re: feedreader notifier (response to 2)

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione on 02/21/04 01:03 PM

Malte, some work of our students here at Sydney might help:

http://www.weg.ee.usyd.edu.au/projects/det_ug2003

Title: Web Based SMS Notification Service using Open ACS
Author: Jackson Chung Kit Chow

Jackson modified notifications to handle SMS. Basically he added SMS as a notification mecanism within the package (it was actually neat simple as he implemented it using service contracts). I can't remember the full details, but I personally tested it in Sydney with an SMS modem and it worked really well.

Moreover, there's another interesting package that "filters" information from different RSS sources and could use the notification package to generate instant annoucements: say you want to be notified if the subject of a particular source news is 'SCO goes bankrupt', so as soon as that happens, you are immediatly notified by whatever mean (SMS/Email/etc) you have selected.

Title: Market Intelligence platform
Author: Kim Hoan Tran

I hope that helps

Ernie

4: Re: feedreader notifier (response to 1)

Posted by Andrew Grumet on 02/23/04 02:49 PM

Malte, IIRC notifications was coded to consume service contracts, under the assumption that email would just be one of many possible notification types. So adding new types should be a small delta rather than a rewrite. Ernie's post suggests that this is so.

What an interesting idea to have "RSS Channel" be a possible notification type! Assuming it doesn't require unreasonable storage or performance hits, this would enable a totally personalized site update stream. The user could select "My Channels" notification type, and add the notification to a set of user-editable channels each of which generates an RSS feed.

Tempting...

5: Re: feedreader notifier (response to 1)

Posted by Ben Koot on 02/23/04 07:50 PM

Some of you may be interested to know what I am upto.

I am working on a concept whereby RSS is used to generate reservations in the travel industry. I have been apointed country manager Netherlands for http://www.eturbonews.com and am working on creating a blogger network for about 200 traveltrade journalist spread around the globe for starters.

The next project is the rollout of "blogging for busisness" http://www.timedesk.nl/etnnewdesign.htm (mockup only) , an advertising concept based on classified adds and RSS to deliver both the special offer and the follow up sales process, incorporating workflow, Chat, IM, micropayments via paypal and RSS. Since the media network has over 209.000 subscribers worldwide, this could become a major challenge and a great testbed for the localisation features in OACS

Ultimate goal. reduce the number of irrelevant steps in the travel reservation process and reduction of releience on traveltrade only ( and thus expensive) technology. I hope to get the go ahead at ITB, world travel show in Berlin, next month. If it works, I might need some additional assisstance, and I 'll do everything possible to create an acceptable budget to be able to pay for the finetuning.

More later.

Cheers
Ben

6: Re: feedreader notifier (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 02/23/04 10:15 PM

Yes, notifications is written using the service contract paradigm. This makes possible the development of plug-ins for delivery in addition to the standard e-mail plug-in, as the University of Sydney folks have done.

The handling of replies (as is currently implemented in the forums package, for instance) is also service-contract based...