I am glad to finally put online a new option of Talk Digger: the RSS feed generator. With that new option, you have the possibility to generate a RSS feed and follow the evolution of a discussion around a specific URL within your favorite feed reader.

What is interesting with that new feature is that you can have access to all the power of Talk Digger from anywhere. The only thing you need is that that “anywhere” support RSS feeds in someway. So you can now easily access to Talk Digger’s searches from your mobile phone or PDA; the only thing you need is a feed reader.

From the How does it work? information page:

This option give you the possibility to have access to the results of a Talk Digger search via a RSS feed. If you go to the RSS feeds generator page, you will be able to generate a custom feed that will fill your exact needs.

How to use it?

1. Go to the RSS feeds generator page
2. Put the URL you want to search for into the edit box at the left of the “Generate RSS feed” button
3. Two type of information are included into the RSS feed for each search engine
4. Results number. This is the total of results returned by the search engine
5. Results content. This is the news items that the search engine had recently indexed into his database
6. Check the boxes you want to include into your Talk Digger search feed. For example, if you only need the results number and the results content of Technorati, then you only have to check the two boxes at the right of the Technorati line and leave the others unchecked
7. Press the “Generate RSS feed” button when you selected all the options you wanted to include into your RSS search feed
8. Copy the new link that will appears at the bottom of the RSS feed generator
9. Add this new feed (the generated link) into your favorite RSS reader

How does it work?

Once you subscribed to the generated RSS feed, all the new results will appear into your favorite RSS reader.

• If you have selected the “Results number” option, the number of results returned by a search engine will appear as a single, new item into the feed
• If you have selected the “Results content” option, each new results found by the search engine will appear as a single, new, item into the feed

Updating these feeds could be sometime slow. The rapidity of updates depends on the quality of the search engines services at that time. The fact is that each time you refresh a Talk Digger search RSS feed, a request to each search engine is send, and then Talk Digger wait for the answers. If the search engines are slow, then Talk Digger will be too.

When you create a Talk Digger search feed, you can build one feed that will search all search engines at once, or you can build one separate feed for each search engine. What is the difference? The rapidity of the requests. You will see the results much faster if you build a separate feed for each search engine because Talk Digger will not have to wait until receiving the results from all search engines to create the RSS feed. The problem with that method is that you need to subscribe to more RSS feeds.

Sometimes, the search engines could be too slow to answer to a Talk Digger requests. If it happens, Talk Digger only omits to add the results from these search engines. It is the reason why some results are sometime missing. However, do not worry, when the connection between Talk Digger’s server and the search engine’s will be better, the results will be available and then included into the RSS feed the next time you will request an update of that RSS feed.

If you find a bug, a glitch, or have a new idea to increase the power of that new feature, please leave a comment on that post.

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