RSS and Filesystem Monitoring and Alerting.

Filed under: bookmarks, feeds

Within SupraSphere you can have fairly granular control over different notification and alert levels. You can decide that in certain spheres, you want to have a new tab open when a new message arrives (push) or that you want to be able to check messages only periodically (pull). The latter is particularly useful if you subscribe to numerous mailing lists and want to check them only every couple of days or so, but also want to make sure that you have a readily searchable archive of the the list in the event that you don’t check them for a period.

In the event that you haven’t checked messages in a long time, there is a convenient directory that shows, for every sphere, how many new messages since you last checked, with the ability for each sphere to “set all read” as well as “show all new” across all spheres.

For desktop notification, you can also set system tray preferences, with parameters such as “notify to the system tray when someone replies to one of my messages” or “always notify to the system tray for the first message opened in the sphere when a new tab is opened”.

How does this relate to RSS and filesystem monitoring? Well, these are two areas of the application where we are working diligently to improve notification and alert preferences. We are currently developing a mechanism to monitor all assets in a given sphere for keywords or keyword tags. When RSS is selected as an asset type to be monitored, we will poll feeds (or sets or sub-sets of feeds contained in a given sphere) for new messages that contain either specific keywords or sets of keyword tags. Because we have historical tags (and keyword searches saved as tags), we can do queries such as “monitor my top 5 most used spheres and only notify me if an article matches at least 2 recently created tags from any of my 5 most recently created contacts”.

Furthermore, once we are monitoring RSS, we will also be able to search RSS feeds. While this is a more common capability of many RSS readers and services, we don’t want to add that capability until we add more powerful mechanisms to manage the large volume of new information that it will create.

As far as filesystem monitoring, we are adding the ability to monitor a specific directory for new files and have them automatically transferred securely to the server, where they will get indexed if they are PDF or common office document types. Furthermore, SupraSphere will prompt for a new file dialog where tags can be applied and where the sphere can be selected.

We might eventually allow transferring the contents of an entire directory, but this will not be a high priority for the coming release. There are already products that will index the contents of your a hard drive, so we are focusing on areas where we can create immediate value. Furthermore, this will create a strong temptation for me (and others) to use SupraSphere to share media files files, which I don’t want to do until we have the economic model a bit more figured out. :)