How to show RSS as pop-up?

Question

On my website users can post comments on a document. Now I want to send an RSS feed to the webmasters when a comment is posted. I want the webmaster to be notified by a small pop-up in the right corner of the page. So this is what's happening:

1. User adds comment
2. system checks if webmaster is logged in
3. if webmaster is logged in; show pop-up in right corner with the title of the comment in it.

How to accomplish this?

Answer 1

1. Setup a javascript timer to call a webservice periodically (every 5 seconds?) if the user is a webmaster. This webservice can determine if a new comment has been added since the last time it was checked. The webservice returns nothing if no new comment or some information about the comment if there is a new one.
2. If the webservice returns a comment, put that information into a div tag that you have created on your page and make it visible. If you are sure the webmaster is using a modern browser, you can use position:fixed to put this div tag in the upper right corner. If not, you will have to use some javascript to accomplish this.

Answer 2

Unless you're using a comet style service to push notifictaions to the webmaster's browser, you're going to need to make a page that polls for new notifications at a pre-defined interval. You can then make an AJAX call to the service and parse the response on to a web page that only the webmaster has access to.

If you're interested in comet (services that can push data to the connected client), you can get a start at Wikipedia :

Comet (programming)