Coding4Fun

Feed Grabber

We've seen that addons can do powerful things, and it's up to your imagination how you improve World of Warcraft's interface, but they can't really communicate with the outside world. Although Lua comes with standard libraries that provide features such as opening and reading files and accessing operating system services, these libraries are not available inside World of Warcraft for security reasons. Thus, Feed Reader cannot download the feeds itself. If only there was a way to provide that information from outside World of Warcraft....

Saved variables provides a great way to persist data for an addon between multiple sessions, and is stored as an ordinary Lua file under World of Warcraft's installation directory. Although the file is used to save and load the variables listed as SavedVariables in the addon's TOC file by World of Warcraft, nobody said it can't be modified by another application. We just have to make sure we save the information at the right time.

Feed Grabber is a simple application that sits in the task tray and saves the content of the top-level feeds in Windows Common Feed List to the SavedVariables file associated with Feed Reader.

Common Feed List

The Common Feed List is available on Windows XP SP2 with Internet Explorer 7 installed and on Windows Vista. It maintains a list of RSS feeds in a folder hierarchy and can be enabled to periodically download these feeds. Whenever Internet Explorer 7 detects an RSS feed on the current page, the feed icon ...