Google Apps Hacks

256 GOOGLE APPS HACKS

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We mentioned earlier how it’s impossible to simply subscribe to a group’s feed in order to nd

replies to one specic thread, as that feed would contain posts to any thread in the group. However,

with a little Yahoo! Pipes magic, you can actually lter an RSS feed for specic words, to then create

a second feed showing just the items you want (in this case, just the replies to the thread you’re

watching).

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Hitting the “Track me!” button

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How do you get email alerts for non-Google-native discussion threads—all those on Usenet?

(You can’t simply subscribe to a group’s RSS feed, as it would show you every new message, not

just replies to your question.) The answer comes in the form of what is called a web page change

detection service. These services let you provide a couple of URLs, and will then email you whenever

the page in question was updated. If you provide the Google Groups URL of the Usenet thread to

such a service, you will then be able to track it.

Here are a couple of different change detection services, many of them free, to get you started—note

that you can get creative and use these services for tracking much more than just Google Groups:

TrackEngine (http://trackengine.com)

InfoMinder (http://infominder.com)

ChangeDetection (http://changedetection.com)

For instance, after registering with TrackEngine, ...