A simple Thanks

Yes a simple thanks can do wonders. I have always believed that I am capable of doing many/all things, but have always found the motivation lacking. But when someone one, out of the blue, appreciates the work you did out of free will, then it makes a difference. It makes your Day.

Since last week, when I published RSS feeds and made the email notification service available for TnP notices about 175 people have subscribed to Email notifications and about 30 people are using Twitter to follow. But the good part is: 3 people have mailed me expressing thanks.

Person 1: I am quite late in saying this. Thanks a lot. This has been a great help

Person 2: I love you for the tnp service you have provided…puchhhhhhhhhhiiiiiiiiessssssss

Person 3: I visited the site for the TnP notices feed. Its so nice of you to make such an arrangement. Btw, the idea of using twitter is really cool.

 

Me on a new high… it feels good to be of use…. atleast to some.

Current Song: Hum jo chalne lage… chalne lage hai yeh raaste… manzil se behtar lagne lage hai yeh raaste…

Udit said, “Let there be RSS”

and RSS feeds were available.

Okies it has so happened that TnP work in KGP is being done through a new TnP Website. All the notices are being posted on the website itself and one doesn’t need to go to TnP to check all the notices. Cool na. But what was uncool about the website that the notices section didn’t have RSS feed. Now how in the world can you make such a website in which the notices section doesn’t provide RSS feeds.

Since the Website has been made by a group of students, I told them to put feeds, but it seems they were busy in fixing other high priority bugs. So I decided, “Bahut ho gaya, Main bar bar site pe nahin ja sakta hoon notices check karne ke liye…. ab iske feeds create karne padenge…“.

Then a few lines of Perl code, some useful regular expressions, knowledge of how to write a Feed XML file and the presence of Arpit’s external domain made it possible. Now you can subscribe to the RSS feeds of TnP notices.

The feed is available at http://www.tnp.intinno.com/tp.xml. I don’t guarantee a 100% correct feed, but whenever you find a bug, please let me know. Also since TnP site is visible from outside Kgp, I don’t think making Feeds public violates any rules. Also right now the feed content only contains the link to the notice, as I didn’t have the tempo to parse the whole notice.

Ok if you are not sure what exactly is an RSS feed, you can read here or here.

And to subscribe to this RSS feed you will need an aggregator. This can be Google Reader, your google homepage, or you could add this feed on your Orkut page by clicking on “add stuff” link on your homepage, or you could Bloglines. Since I don’t want the dependency of Web to read my feeds I use an desktop aggregator called Liferea(thats LInux FEed REAder).

 Note – Does anybody know how to track the number subscribers of this feed???