Garage & Updates

Did you know that there are several ways to stay up to date with what’s going on at Skype Developer Zone?

All parts of the Zone — blog, wiki, and Jira — support RSS, so you can use your favourite news aggregator to keep track of changes. The wiki also has a special RecentChanges page that you can check every now and then.

To use RSS in the blog, just scroll down a little until you see a box titled “Subscribe to this blog” in the right column. Depending on your choice of news aggregator, click on an appropriate icon and follow the instructions. In Firefox, you can also hit the “add live bookmark” icon at the very right of your address bar. Oh, and in case you don’t yet know what is RSS or what these icons stand for, then you can read more about it right here.

To use RSS in the wiki (including both the main site and the community-editable wiki), hit the live bookmark icon in Firefox, or enter this URI into your news aggregator. You can also fine-tune the feed by adding certain parameters at the end of this URI:

• “&items=nnn” allows you to get more than the default 15 items (you cannot get more than 100 items though);
• “&unique=1″ allows you to get a list of changes where page names are unique, i.e. where only the latest change of each page is reflected;
• “&diffs=1″ allows you to add change diffs to the description of each item;
• and “&ddiffs=1″ allows you to link directly to the diff (good for FeedReader).

The wiki also has a special page called RecentChanges that shows you the changes made to the wiki. There’s a trick to be used on this page too — if you click on “set bookmark” link on the page then on your next visit you’ll only see the changes made after the bookmark was set. So you don’t have to randomly browse through the entire site ever again

Finally, Jira provides an RSS feed for each and every filter, including the filters you’ve created for your personal use. For example, this link takes you to the feed for the filter “All issues”. Again, Firefox users can make use of the live bookmark icon; other news aggregators provide their own tools for feed discovery.