Staying up to date with our poker alerts and RSS Feeds
Posted Friday, March 23, 2007 in
PokerDIY Website
0 Comments | 2387 Views |
RSS is a standard/format (trying to keep this in plain English and non-technical) that pushes information to you instead of you having to dig around and find it. This sounds dreadfully boring to me as a poker player, but hear me out, as after reading this you should have more time to spend playing poker!
RSS is a way of streamlining information you request into a more manageable/readable format, which means you can find what you are looking for, faster.
You "subscribe" to different RSS feeds that interest you, and periodically your RSS reader of choice will ping the site for an update and grab any info that you have asked for. There are a lot of RSS Readers out there, some are more fancy than others, but they all essentially do the same thing - read the XML feed and display it to you in a nice format so you can quickly scan through and pick items that catch your interest.
So, how can RSS help us poker players? Well, for one, have you ever been to a busy poker forum and battle to scan through all the new posts and replies etc? Well now you can just grab the Forum feed and keep an eye on new posts, and IF you like the look of one THEN you go to the site and read it in more detail etc. Why bother opening the site if you just want to read a little bit of content?
So, to start off, have a look at
this page - we have found 2 very good RSS FAQs/Tutorials that even my dear mother could understand (I'm quizzing her on RSS next week). Then we have highlighted the 4 most important feeds on PokerDIY that mean you can stay on top of things:
Another real-life example to mix poker and RSS is our Upcoming Games Feed- as soon as anyone makes a public game (your private games are never syndicated through RSS) then your RSS Reader will grab it and show it to. For example, I use an RSS Reader called
Sharp Reader - it acts a bit like Instant Messenger, so when I get updated feeds they pop-up briefly and I can click on it if it interests me (you have to be careful to not waste too much time reading your feeds, and be VERY selective - this just gives you more information in a more streamlined format to get through each day, but you should find you can find the information you want more efficiently). So imagine if we set up a private poker freeroll with a password and limited spaces - the first 10 people get in... you get notified immediately via RSS and a little message pops up on your desktop or browser saying there is a new tourney... the password is yours for the taking ;)
So, check out our
consolidated page of our most important feeds (they are scattered around PokerDIY too - keep an eye out for the little orange RSS symbol -
) and grab the ones you want, and never worry about missing another poker freeroll password or useful forum discussion! Now you know what RSS is, you'll start to notice these little orange icons everywhere, so start grabbing the feeds you like...
If you are still unsure of how RSS can benefit us poker players, feel free to ask a question on the forums and we'll try to help!