When you Log In to the message board, forums with new topics will be highlighted and you will see if you have any new private messages. RSS provides similar functionality without logging in, and allows you to track all the RSS-enabled websites you use without visiting each of them.
The RSS/XML icon you'll see on various forum pages always leads you to this page, but each of those pages also has a so-called auto-discovery link that helps an RSS-aware browser find the overall feed. Clicking on the page's icon instead of the browser's built-in button allows you to subscribe to various per-forum feeds that won't show from auto-discovery. Each of the feeds also contains a link to this page, but your browser may suppress that display. You can subscribe to RSS feeds or you can log into the message board and set it to watch a certain topic in a certain forum (which will send you an email whenever a reply is posted there).
| Safari 2 browser notes | ||
| RSS is very simple on Safari 2 (not sure how Safari 1 behaved). If Safari can auto-discover the RSS feed, an RSS button appears in the address bar. Click it to view that feed, but remember that Climber.Org only supports auto-discovery of the overall feed. Other feeds can be viewed below. You can bookmark the RSS feed. To return to the web page you were viewing, click the RSS button again. | ||
| Safari can notify you whenever an RSS feed you've bookmarked has articles that are new since you last viewed it. Choose Safari>Preferences, and click RSS. Select which RSS feed bookmarks you want to update, and then choose how often to check for updates. You can also choose to highlight new articles when you view the feed. When new articles appear in a website's RSS feed, Safari displays the number of new articles beside the name of the feed's bookmark. | ||
| Mozilla Firefox browser notes | ||
| If you use the Firefox browser, you'll see descriptions about each feed as you prepare to subscribe. The first feed item will be a duplicate of that description PLUS some info on other feeds and when the feed was last updated. | ||
| There doesn't seem to be a dedicated place to view all your RSS feeds, they're just put into the Bookmarks pull-down. If you choose to put them in Live Bookmarks, they will show on the toolbar at all times and you can pull down the toolbar icon to show an individual item's web page. | ||
| Firefox never shows you which feeds have new items or which items in a feed are new. It always shows you all the items in the feed, so subscribing seems to be just an easy way to build a large set of bookmarks (as compared to the incremental nature of MSIE 7's feeds). | ||
| MSIE 6 browser notes | ||
| If you use MSIE 6 or earlier, you can't view RSS feeds at all. The XML file will appear as raw text in angle brackets and won't be useful. | ||
| MSIE 7 browser notes | ||
| In late 2006 MicroSoft released a major rewrite of Internet Explorer (MSIE) that supports not only RSS feeds, but auto-discovery, incremental feed viewing, tabbed browsing, etc. Many of the things that made Firefox better have been matched, some have been bested. If you use MSIE 7, the feed description is hidden from you... but the first feed item will contain the description so you can see it anyway. | ||
| MSIE 7 has a little star on the left of the toolbar that can access all your feeds. When viewing feeds, those containing new items (e.g. those you haven't yet looked at with this browser on this computer) are shown in boldface. Even before you open the feed (or folder of feeds) you can hold the cursor over the link to display how many new items there are and when the feed was last checked. A nifty feature that I couldn't find in Firefox! | ||
| Apparently only in MSIE 7, opening the feed will by default display only the new items unless you click the All link or unless there are no new items. | ||
If someone with any other browser tells me how the feeds display, I'll add that here. I'll also correct mistakes above and/or point out nifty features of any RSS feed aggregator so people can use these feeds more efficiently.
Our Web Forums (aka Message Boards) are for discussion and announcements by mountaineers, climbers, and hikers. Some message boards are specific to a climbing area, some focus on a topic of interest, others are for members of various groups. The feeds below are updated at 40 minutes after each hour.
| The links below will work in any RSS-aware web browser or RSS aggregator. | ||
| There is an overall message board RSS feed that shows a new RSS item each time any forum gets a new post. This will only be useful if you wish to monitor most of the forums and don't mind a lot of new RSS items. | ||
| summary of all forums | http://climber.org/rss/Forum.xml | Shows total number of topics and posts in each forum even if topics aren't visible in feeds below. |
| There are also per-forum RSS feeds that detail each new topic as a new RSS item. These feeds keep you up to date with new topics AND new posts: | ||