Mark Pack

I thought I’d share a little trick which others may find useful too for using the Liberal Democrat social network, ACT. Over the weekend I created a group for the Liberal Democrat History Group and was faced with the common dilemma, “It’s good to have a presence where people are, but how will I keep it up to date with content?”

ACT allows you to display an RSS feed on a group page, which deals with this question if the organisation has a blog or regular series of news stories. The History Group has neither, but it does have an active email newsletter list run via the party’s email list server.

The list server has a handy little feature, which is very rarely used. It produces an RSS feed of each public email list.

So if you go to http://lists.libdems.org.uk/wws/info/liberalhistory (or the equivalent page for other lists) you will see an RSS option in the left-hand menu.

This brings up a page with the RSS URLs, in this case:

http://lists.libdems.org.uk/wws/rss/latest_arc/liberalhistory?count=20&for=10

The two variables at the end of the URL can be edited. Count determines how many messages are included in the RSS feed (the last ten? the last twenty? the last fifty? etc.) and For determines, in days, how old the oldest message included can be.

An an example, in this case if there are no emails from the last 10 days, then the feed will be empty. However, if 52 messages have been sent in the last 10, only the most recent 20 will be included in the feed.

Tweak these two numbers as needed and you have an RSS feed to include on a group page on ACT, or indeed anywhere else.