Voicemail RSS

[benh]

I have been using the voicemail RSS feed on my Google personalized page. It's a great way, while at work, to see when I have voicemail at home. However, the problem I am seeing is that the voicemail entry shows up, but doesn't go away for a long time (ever?). Currently, two items are being displayed on my Google page, but I don't have any voicemails showing in the viatalk control panel. One is from 12/24 and the other from 12/26. What's up with that? Why don't they go away once I have deleted the voicemail?

Thanks,
Ben

[Brendan]

I'll have a dev guy check on this for ya.

-Brendan

[Brian188]

Works fine for me. It's gone off my reader right after being deleted via telephone. Also gone from Firefox live bookmarks.

[hrethan]

I played around with this a little and I'm not entirely sure why vm entries would keep showing up days after you deleted/moved them. One thing I noticed, though, was that you have to mark the vm entries as read in order for Google to actually update/refresh the feed.

I moved a vm, but it continued to show up on my Google personalized page, even after clicking their little refresh link. Then I clicked on the vm entry, which tells Google that I've read it, and then clicked their little refresh link and the entry disappeared.

Give that a whirl.

[benh]

Hrethan: Are you clicking on the voicemail entry from within the vt control panel, or on your Google personalized homepage? When I click from Google, the browser simply attempts to pull down a wav file from viatalk, assuming there is actually a voicemail to pull down. Currently, however, I have three entries listed that don't actually exist as voicemails on the server. When I click one of those entries, I receive a zero byte file called vmrss.

Where is this refresh link you're referring to? I see that nowhere on my Google homepage.

[hrethan]

I'm clicking on the vm entry in Google Reader, on my Personalized Google Homepage. It's supposed to download the wav file, but that action also marks the entry as read (and it should disappear).

I just thought of something else though. The option to make "read" entries disappear from Google Reader is not on by default. If you don't have that setting on, entries will appear whether you've read them or not. In Google Reader there's an option at the top of the view that says "x new items [show only new] ... " If you click the "show only new" it will change to "show all" and anything marked as read will disappear.

Attached is a screenshot of my google home page. You can see the "refresh" link in the top left.

[benh]

I am not using Google Reader. I have simply added the ViaTalk RSS feed as its own gadget. From the homepage, click 'Add Stuff', and then click 'Add by URL' beside the search button. The independent Google gadget does not have the refresh link.

[hrethan]

Oh... I gave that a try and I see what you're talking about. My recommendation is: don't do that. The ViaTalk RSS Feed is not designed to be a Google gadget, it's designed to be used with a news reader.

[fareal]

Anyone use the actual Google Reader and notice the embedded player doesn't play VT voicemails? You have to click Original Source for it to download the message.

[fareal]

I've been using the VM RSS on my Google Personal Page since I read this thread. For this particular RSS feed I like it better on the google page. Tonight I just noticed that I can expand each VM entry on the google page to read the details of the VM.. from, time, date, duration. I'm pretty sure this wasn't there before tonight. Nice.