6 ways to subscribe to Box Platform updates

A few weeks ago, we announced the new Box Platform developer changelog as the best place to stay up-to-date with changes to our API, SDKs, CLI, and more.

In this post, we want to take you through six easy ways to get automatic notifications of any new updates.

1. RSS feeds (10 of them!)

By far the simplest way to stay up to date is via RSS. We’ve added 10 different RSS feeds to our developer changelog, including a feed for all changes and feeds for each of our SDKs, CLI, and more.

Copying an RSS feed

To access an RSS feed, head over to the developer changelog, and in the right hand navigation select one of the orange RSS icons. You can either click on them and then copy the URL in your address bar, or right click on them and copy the link location.

To make things easier, we’ve listed them all below as well.

All changes: developer.box.com/changelog/all.xml
New features: developer.box.com/changelog/new-features.xml
Impactful changes: developer.box.com/changelog/impactful.xml
API changes: developer.box.com/changelog/api.xml
Java SDK: developer.box.com/changelog/java.xml
Windows SDK: developer.box.com/changelog/windows.xml
Python SDK: developer.box.com/changelog/python.xml
Node SDK: developer.box.com/changelog/node.xml
Box CLI: developer.box.com/changelog/cli.xml
UI Elements: developer.box.com/changelog/ui-elements.xml

You can add these RSS feeds to your favorite RSS reader like Feedly, or you can use the RSS feed as the input to other integrations — which we will show you now.

2. Slack

With an RSS feed in-hand it’s pretty easy to integrate the updates into your Slack workspace.

To set up notifications in your Slack workspace, head over to the built-in RSS integration for Slack, log in to your Slack instance, add the RSS app to your workspace, and then set up a first RSS feed.

An RSS subscription to all Box Platform changes

Hit “Subscribe to this feed”, and from now on any Box platform changes will automatically appear in the channel you selected.

A changelog entry in Slack

3. Microsoft Teams

Using Microsoft Teams instead of Slack? Not a problem, as Teams has a similar built-in solution for RSS.

In Teams, head over to the Apps tab and search for RSS.

Finding the RSS connector in Micosoft Teams

Select the RSS connector by Microsoft and add it to your team.

Adding the RSS connector to a team

This will ask for a team or group to add the RSS feed to. Once you’ve set this up, you will need to configure the RSS feed to subscribe to.

An unconfigured RSS feed integration

Click on Configure and provide the RSS feed you want to subscribe to.

Configuring an actual RSS feed

Hit save, and you should instantly see the latest items from the feed appear in the team you selected.

4. Email (using IFTTT)

Another way to stay up to date is to automatically push any new changes to your email inbox. I personally love using IFTTT (pronounced if-this-than-that) for this.

IFTTT is a free tool that allows you to connect many services to eachother. In this case, we can use it to connect an RSS feed to email. It allows you to create your own connectors (they call them applets) but a lot of people have already created the most popular integrations for you to use.

The rss to email applet on IFTTT

I’d recommend using one of the many ready-made applets that connect and RSS feed to email, for example this one. Sign up for an account, and then hit the connect toggle for this integration. It will ask for an RSS feed to subscribe to.

Add the RSS feed and hit Save. Now, every time a new post is made to our changelog, you will receive an automatic email notification.

5. Twitter

If you’d rather not configure your own notifications, we also have our own Twitter account for platform notifications. You can find us at @boxplatform where we automatically post any new changelog notifications, as well as blog posts. We actually use IFTTT for this ourselves!

@boxplatform on Twitter

To get instant mobile notifications, we recommend you subscribe to Twitter notifications for our account by clicking the little bell on the right-hand side of our profile, to the left of the “Following” button.

This will ensure you get instant notifications of any new tweets, ensuring our new won’t get lost amongst the firehose of other

6. In-browser notifications

Finally, if you’d rather visit our website on a regular basis to check for the latest changes then we have a solution for you too.

A new changelog notification

When you return to developer.box.com for the first time in a while, we will automatically notify you of any new changelog notifications by turning the bell at the top of the page orange (it even has a little shake!) and show you which items are new since you last visited.

A new changelog entry marked in blue

We hope you enjoy these new ways to stay up-to-date with Box Platform. Let us know your feedback on our Twitter or via the comments.