September 8, 2011

Dear Internet:

I made you a thing. It’s an RSS feed for Dropbox beta releases.

You can find it at http://feeds.feedburner.com/dropboxmacbeta aka http://bit.ly/rssfordropbox.

(As you may have guessed, it only includes betas for Mac OS X, but if there is interest, I could easily make feeds for Windows and Linux too. Let me know if you’d be interested in those.)

“Why?”

Dropbox betas are (usually) very stable and I want to use them as soon as possible, but I don’t want to have to check the forum every day to see if there is a new build.

“Cool idea… where’d you get it?”

I had the idea after reading this post on StackExchange.

I wrote the script myself.

“How does it work?”

A shell script and a dash of magic.

“No, really, give me the nerdy details”

A shell script checks to see where http://forums.dropbox.com/forum-build.php redirects (using the HTTP ‘Location’ header). If the redirect has changed, that means there is a new beta. If there is a new beta, the script generates a new RSS entry.

The script runs via ‘cron’ every few minutes. Since it only checks the HTTP headers, it should cause no noticeable effect on Dropbox’s servers. Certainly less than a bunch of nerds refreshing the forums URL.

“Your RSS sucks and doesn’t work in [Insert RSS Reader Here]”

Sorry.

I have never worked with RSS before. I cobbled together the necessary parts via Google and checked that I was generating valid RSS according to http://validator.w3.org/.

And it works in Google Reader (which is all I really needed).

If there are specific elements that you would like to see added to the RSS feed, I’d be glad to consider adding them, especially if you provide good instructions on how the RSS should be formed.

“I don’t want to use betas I only want official releases”

That’s a reasonable request and I will probably make an RSS feed for that also, because Dropbox does not auto-update very well. But I wanted this first, so I made this first.

The end

I hope you like it.

p.s.

There is an official RSS feed for Dropbox release notes at https://www.dropbox.com/release_notes/rss.xml but the feedburner feed points directly at the DMGs so you can download them.

1:56pm | URL: http://luoma.tumblr.com/post/9957496270/dropbox-rss
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