Simon Fell > Its just code > Weblogs Watcher

Earlier in the week I wrote a subscriber interface for weblogs.com. This allows you to register the URL's of your favorite weblogs, and the subscriber service will call you back when one of your weblogs changes.

Weblogs watcher is a Radio based client to the subscriber service. It does the following

• It regularly subscribes your list of favorites [from Radio's existing weblogs.com tool]
• It listens for the service callbacks, and keeps a log of recent changes.
• It provides a small regularly updated window with the summary of recent changes.
• It provides a couple of functions that can render the summary list in other parts of your radio site [i have it in the home desktop page]

Here's a view of the top of my home desktop page

Clicking the little [watch] link pops up the mini watcher

Installation

If I understand the tools stuff properly, the install should just be a matter of dropping weblogsNotify.root into your tools directory. Radio will spot the new tool and install it. Once installed open Radio goto the Tools menu and select Weblog Watcher -> Send Subscription to force the initial subscription call [it will do it itself, but not until the top of the hour]. At this point, the Weblogs Watcher will appear in the status center on right hand side of the desktop home page. If you want the full recent summary somewhere else, then edit the Desktop Website template and add this in the relevant place

<p><% weblogsNotifyCode.renderLauncher() %>
<% weblogsNotifyCode.renderSummary() %></p>

I have mine just before this chunk of code, the exact place to put it will depend on what template you're using

<p><%bodytext%></p>
<p><%radio.macros.weblogEditBox ()%></p>
<p><%radio.macros.weblogRecentPosts ()%></p>

Configuration

This works by the subscriber service making SOAP calls to your Radio installation, this means that if you're behind a firewall and/or NAT you'll need to allow incoming traffic on 5335 from soap.4s4c.com. You'll also need to make sure that Radio is configured to enable the SOAP interface, and to allow SOAP traffic from soap.4s4c.com [67.113.138.114], see XML-RPC and SOAP in Radio

Todo

The main thing that's lacking at this point is a pref's page, there's not much to twiddle with, but there should be a prefs page for it.