For those of us who don't want to receive a digest, and don't want to visit the board, you can access a feed of the forum using a newsfeed; we provide and Atom feed, but you've probably already heard of an RSS feed.

This can be used in a number of ways, most conveniently in your e-mail client or browser. This typically requires a plug-in for both e-mail and web browsers, I will detail a few browser options below:

Chromium/Chrome:
Feed Reader

You can install this in Chromium or Chrome, by clicking on the link above and then clicking on the "free" button, and agree to the extension accessing your browser. Once installed, add the forums feed by clicking on the small orange icon, to the right of your browser's address bar. It looks similar to this:



Click on "Start using Feed Reader"forums, and then click on the plus (conveniently has an arrow pointing to it).
In the "Add Feed" field, enter the following address: feed.php and then click "Search" - the reader will add the VRG Forum feed.

Now, when new posts are made, the little orange icon will show a number indicating the number of posts, click on the icon, and a drop-down of the new posts will appear, with their titles, you can click on any of them, and the reader will take you to that post on the forum.

Firefox(Iceweasel):
Bamboo Feed Reader

Install this in Firefox, by clicking on the link above, and clicking "Add to Firefox", wait for the countdown to finish, and click install. You will need to restart Firefox to use the plugin. Once restarted, click on the same organge icon I show above - in Firefox, this is to the left of the address bar.

Click on "+ Add" to add a new feed, and in the "Enter a feed URL", place the same link from above: feed.php and click Subscribe. After you've subscribed, click on "Reader", and you'll see the posts since your last visit. This one works a little differently, in that it displays everything - including image content - in the browser, and you don't have to visit the forum (but you should! so we can continue the great discussions).

On the left of the page, you will see Display -- List/Content; clicking on one or the other changes the display from the full content (Content), or just a list of new posts (List) which you can hover over and see a preview of the post.

Internet Explorer:

For this one, I'm handing off to the pros, as I don't run a Windows system. Please refer to the following link for instructions:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/how-to-use-rss-feeds-in-internet-explorer-9

Need help with an e-mail client or browser? Let me know below

Ian:

This work pretty well. The orange icon means "unread" and after you read the post and click on the orange icon in each post it turns blue indicating "read". Do you know if it will automatically remove the red tag in the VRGF to indicate that the latest posts have been "read" there too? I will have to test it next time.

**edit** You mean the other way around - the feed doesn't "phone-home" so to speak, that I'm aware of, so unless you click through to the thread, the forum will still show it as unread when you next visit. I think. **edit**

I suspect if you wait long enough after reading the thread, when it next updates the feed it will see you've read it. While these feeds have been around for a while, I've not used them too terribly much - at least in the browser form.

Yes, they still appear as unread. The easiest solution is to just visit the VRGF regularly to get unread posts and to get the whole preceding thread.

Ian:

I am trying to subscribe to the VRGF RSS feed using my new email client which is Thunderbird. I need the VRGF RSS feed url to set up Thunderbird to subscribe. Can you give us the VRGF RSS feed URL? Once I have that I think Thunderbird will do the rest.

Ian:

I think I got it. I used Thunderbird's Feed Validation Service starting with the VRGF url and came up with http://www.vrgonline.org/forums/feed.php which seems to work. Of course, it was Leigh who figured this out.

+1 Mack & Leigh!!

I find it's rather useful; I'll plug that into my e-mail client at work. Thanks for the tip!

-Ian

RSS feed (AKA Newsfeed) is perfect for people who don't want to have to check the forum manually for new messages. It puts it on the same level of convenience as the Yahoo Group. I think this is why a lot of people objected to getting rid of the Yahoo Group, even though this Forum is so much better. With the Yahoo Group, the messages came to YOU, you didn't have to go looking for them. RSS feed accomplishes the same thing. Mack and I have it set up in our email client (program), which is Thunderbird, but I'll bet most of the email programs have it (I know a lot of people use Outlook). (As Ian has already pointed out, you can set it up through your browser as well, but I don't find this as convenient.) This means that every time there is a new post on the VRG Forum, I get the message in my email program, sort of like getting a message from the Yahoo Group. I no longer have to spend time checking each blog or forum I watch, looking for new messages. Easy peasy.

HIGHLY recommend.

Leigh