Megatokyo Story Discussions RSS Feed

Indolence is the mother of all invention. I couldn’t be bothered to actually check the threadlist for the forum I frequent, I wanted the list of new threads delivered to me as an RSS feed. Instead of a forum plugin or hack, which Cortana in general doesn’t like, I was left with two options. The first and most obvious solution, to screen-scrape the thread list, is a terrible idea, and a waste of Nayuki’s resources.

The Megatokyo Forums are powered by Invision Power Board, which has a neat feature known as “Forum Subscriptions”. Effectively, a user can create an account, login, subscribe to a forum or sub-forum, logout, and have new thread information emailed to them.

I created an account on the forums with a dedicated email address, and subscribed it to the Story Discussions forum. A postfix filter on Hikari intercepts the new message, parses each for useful information, and inserts it into an SQL database. Mail is never delievered to a real mailbox. A second script is used to pull the most recent 12 records from the database, and present them in a RSS2.0 feed.

feed://skunkworks.verselogic.net/sdrss/feed.xml

This feed can now be utilized in any feed reader as desired. Or as a Firefox Live Bookmark.
Assuming it doesn’t create a huge drain on server resources, this script will live here for the forseeable future.