Steve Dimse (author of findu) has been hard at work adding RSS feeds to findu.

“Over the next couple weeks I’ll be adding RSS feeds to findU. If you don’t know, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and is a way to consolidate headlines and links into a newsfeed. I’d played a bit with this, but until I saw it integrated into the new version of Mac OS I didn’t realize how cool this could be, especially as it relates to findU. Unlike most sites where there is one or a small set of news feeds, findU will support custom feeds.

So far I have one example done, the weather warnings. This works very much like the weather warning cgi:

http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/warn-near.cgi?exclude=go&call=k4hg-8&nomap=1

but the URL is:

feed://rss.findu.com/warn.cgi?call=k4hg&max=1500

You have to look at this on an RSS enabled program, otherwise it is just jibberish, but the way it works is at defined intervals the newsreader (in my case Safari, Apple’s web browser) fetches the feed and looks for new news items, in this case weather warnings within 1500 miles of K4HG’s location. Any new items are flagged by the browser, and the user knows there is new news on this channel.

The next things I’ll be doing are message feeds and a near function. You can be automatically notified if a new station appears near you, or if someone sends you an APRS message! After that there will be a position function, where you can track individual stations, and of course weather feeds…I can see lots of potential here.”

So, to get a list of APRS stations within 120 Miles of the TSSG, Waterford IT use the following link (for bloglines aggregator:

http://rss.findu.com/near.cgi?call=EI3RCW-2&last=24&n=25&distance=120

The options for the script are explained here.

I might even get around to putting Tiger onto the Powerbook this week :).

Thank you Steve.