mostly research stuff
just when you thought that you couldn’t get snowed in by yet another RSS / blog syndication tool for research, along comes the chance to drink from the firehose by email…this is about the ERA, email rss aggregator…the summary: you subscribe to selected RSS feeds via email, set the frequency of updates and then you get the crap sent to you by email…this is great news for mobile device users (as in, not only can i now get spam at dunkin’ donuts, but now i can get spam and feeble, watery blog postings! dreams really do come true! … now if only rolling stone would pull jack white from the top 100 guitarists list…yeah, you heard me)
here’s the instruction set, it’s quite simple:
Email interface
To use the ERA email interface, send an email to era@indecorous.com containing commands. You can send more than one command in each email (e.g. you can subscribe to multiple feeds in a single mail).
ERA won’t respond unless it gets valid commands.
For most commands, ERA will then send you an ID number, which you send back to confirm the commands (so that someone can’t impersonate you).
ERA identifies you by your email address, so you always need to send commands from the same emails address.
ERA email interface commands
help get this help text (no confirmation needed)
account [username] get an account
[username]: the username you want for your account (this will be used when the web interface is functional)
list get a list of feeds you’re subscribed to (no confirmation needed)
subscribe [url] [level] subscribe to a feed
[url]: URL of the RSS file you want to subscribe to
[level] (optional)
1 - hourly emails (default)
2 - 0600, 1200, 1800, 0000
3 - 1200, 0000
4 - 0000
unsubscribe [url] unsubscribe from a feed
and here’s the exact same information on the actual site: era ~ email interface
this blog is mostly safe for work, though i sometimes throw around a 'fuck' or two. you'll find a bunch of my articles from CI Magazine, SCIP online, other research pieces and some other crap. enjoy. there's lost of content here related to getting information about, around, from and through people and organizations...
Ian Malpass
June 16th, 2004 at 4:00 pm
The subscribe command’s syntax changed a bit, by the way. I was slightly slow in updating the docs when I was adding features….
Dave
June 16th, 2004 at 4:40 pm
thanks ian! i’ll check back shortly for updated commands to edit this post. btw, it really IS cool, the tool you made…only problem to reconcile is the content of the blogs… ;)