Updating an app's news feed remotely

Unity Engine
,
1

Hi there,

I’m really new to this so I was hoping someone could point me in the right direction. I’d like to have a news feed within my app that I could update remotely.

I was thinking of putting a file on my website somewhere that I could fill with news items and the app would look at on load to check if there were any new items. I am just wondering if this is a bad idea. I guess my concern straight away is that someone else could hack the file and put some random crap in there.
Is there a standard way to do this? I imagine it would be done all the time but I’m stuck as to what to search for…

Any help would be great!

Thanks,
Pete

2

Disclaimer: I’ve never done anything like this yet, so this is just conjecture on my part. I’m a web developer by day, and only an amateur, first-time game developer.

If security is a big issue of yours, you could put your news items in a database on a server instead. This would at least give a user/password screen to protect your content, although, to be honest, any decent web host should be able to ensure the security of any file you’d put up.

3

Hey thanks Shnieider21! I didn’t get an alert for your reply. Yeah actually ,aybe I am worrying too much about it. I guess I’ll know pretty quick if someone has hacked it.

4

Did you ever find a solution?

5

Yes but I’m not sure if it’s the best, you can just put a text file up on your server somewhere and load it like this -

    var url = "http://www.yoursitename.com/somefolder/NewsUpdate.txt";

    var www : WWW = new WWW (url);
    yield www;

    if (www.error != null){
        print ("Error Loading news update data = "+www.error);
        return;
    } else{
       print (www.data);
    }

I was a bit worried about someone hacking it but it’s probably not a problem??

6

I kind of have a similar problem but i need a news feed like facebook or tumblr where
the posts might have pictures too and a text file limits that, a possible solution is to have each entry with a picture simply contain a link to the picture that is uploaded onto another folder on the server.

But that’s for your solution , I can’t really use this method because I’ll need to add push notifications at a later date and a text file definitely won’t be able to handle that unless you code something that’s honestly not worth the time. Best solution for me would be an RSS feed and I actually managed to get that working using a local server (XAMP) but as soon as I put it online the results are not what I want.

I have been looking at this asset: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/1064 which seems to be exactly what I need, because the problem could be in how I am coding my PHP