I have a ruby script that I run in a Terminal on OS X to see new questions. It only takes a fraction of a second to run and get the new questions. I usually run it every few minutes if I have time to kill.
@monsoon
I wrote a little program that can check Fluther and alert me to new questions. It runs every couple minutes. I only use it when I would normally be checking the site so the site doesn’t get swamped with my requests.
It is super fast since it doesn’t deal with images or the page layout. It just grabs the new questions and lists them.
edit :: And the program was made for learning about how to automate capturing pieces of information from the internet. Basically screen-scraping.
also, if you make your interests and etc on you’re profile with commas (rather than periods like you have already), you’ll be notified when a question is made that you might want to answer. right now you’re using periods between them, so when people make a tag that is one of your interests, you won’t be notified, they have to be separated with commas.
i just check the page often…i’m in front of a computer all day and always have a Fluther Tab open in my browser, so it’s easy to check. i used to have the rss feed going, but I have found that it is sometimes not as up-to-date as you would hope for…at least with my reader in Firefox.
also, since there aren’t just 5 members of fluther, you have a ton of people who happen to click refresh or view the page at different times.
Someone made a Dashboard widget, you can find it on the Fluther blog if you search.
For me, I just check the site every now few hours or when I’m near a computer or bored and have my phone. I get enough email as it is, especially moderation email. Alerts for new questions would swamp me.