Forum Moderators: phranque
Here's our problem. We have a member-based website with several thousand members. We do regular website news/product updates via email, however email is getting less and less reliable because of spam filters, changing addresses, etc.. We have a very loyal member base, because we send them valuable information (and not too often).
RSS is great, but it's pretty much "under the radar" for a lot of our members, as they're not really a technical bunch.
What I'd like is a way to do a "desktop alert" service where I can pop-up updates on their desktop. Kind of RSS that's "pushed" to them in a way that they can't miss, yet isn't too obtrusive. I think our members would be happy to receive this service and be willing to download a small software client onto their computers.
I've seen this done with "post-it notes software lite version" from 3M. But the only sites I've seen use this ability is sites affiliated with 3M. I can't seem to find any instructions for creating the server-side files that generate the "feed" for the post-it notes.
I've also seen a few commercial services that provide this for several thousand dollars, which is a little out of our range.
So, my question is this... has anyone seen a 3M post-it subscription tutorial somewhere? Or is there a better way to do what I'd like to accomplish? Is there someway to do a RSS feed to a desktop client that's maybe even free?
--Mark
I'll post if I get a response. Anyone have other ideas?
I'm curious why RSS would be any more difficult than this 3rd party, proprietary software solution you're looking at. If you're going to give your users software why not just pre-configure an RSS reader with your feed and give that to everyone?
I know how to create an RSS feed, but I didn't know you could "preconfigure an RSS reader" for visitors. That would solve my problem. I assumed a standard RSS feed would be too complicated... but if I could link to a preconfigured RSS reader, we're in business.
Can someone point me to some more info?
--Mark
