8 Aug 2002 abram   » (Observer)

I added a new feature to Hep. Here's how it works. You give Hep the URL of a web page you'd like to subscribe to. Hep grabs the page from the URL, and passes it (along with the original URL and HTTP headers) to each of its message source drivers. Each driver gets a chance to analyze the page information and try to get messages from that page. If it can, it returns a working configuration. If not, Hep goes on to the next driver.

Currently I've added support for community sites using Slash, Virgule, or PHP-Nuke, weblogs that use either a <link> tag or an xml.gif image to point to their RSS feed, and individual diaries on Virgule-powered sites. And I wrote a simplified "Subscribe" bookmarklet that just passes Hep the URL of the web page you're currently looking at. This makes the process of adding a message source almost completely painless:

  1. While browsing, you come accross a page you'd like to subscribe to.
  2. You hit the Subscribe link on your browser's Links toolbar.
  3. You're transferred to Hep, which verifies that you want to add the page as a message source.
  4. You press OK, and are returned to the original page.
  5. From that point forward you get a message in your Inbox every time the page is updated.

All this and more in Hep 0.2.3, coming soon!

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