brainwagon

I like to peruse sweetcode, a very nice website that contains pointers to interesting but perhaps not very well known software projects. During a recent browse, I noticed a link to a project called nntp//rss. Interestingly enough, it provided a gateway that allowed you to access RSS feeds via NNTP from your favorite newsreader. For a lark, I decided to give it a download.

On this website, I use Movable Type which allows the
publication of RSS feeds, and also has a plugin that allows you to merge other RSS feeds to your homepage. I use it to merge the feeds I use most (Slashdot, freshmeat, CNN, and Reuters Science) on my homepage, which keeps from having to use a different portal site. I’ve been toying with
expanding my knowledge and use of RSS feeds, as they seem an interesting way to combine information from many websites.

Originally, I didn’t think that nntp//rss would be all that useful. After all, I nearly always have a web browser open, and therefore I could always get my webfeeds by merely accessing this site. But I found out that I was wrong.

nntp//rss is nice because it capitalizes on one fact I hadn’t considered: I have my mailbox (via Netscape or Mozilla) open even more often than I have a web browser up. I can now
see if there are any new postings on slashdot or freshmeat by merely glancing at the overview.
I find that to be rather cool!

I exchanged a brief thank you to the author, Jason Brome, and made a couple of suggestions which seemed obvious: the ability to actually post to the weblog via the normal NNTP interface. This could be done by a XMLRPC<->NNTP gateway using the Blogger API. This has at least one
major advantage over the normal way of posting: I could use my normal nntp client (slrn, which
uses my normal Unix editor) to enter new messages, and not have to struggle with trying to
type and edit inside of HTML text boxes.

Anyway, you can see what this looks like by using https://brainwagon.org as an NNTP server. You’ll only get a couple of websites, but it will show what the idea is.

Nifty stuff!