I’ve been trying for a while to figure out how best to read blogs.
Right now I use three different methods — I use iGoogle for some things, plain old web browsing for some, and then gnus for one feed. What a pain! I’ve also tried other readers in the past — a couple web-based one, Azureus, maybe something else.
None of these are ideal for me. I think what I would really like is to use Gnus for everything, except Gnus blocks annoyingly while fetching the feeds. So, I could use nntp//rss. But then I am setting up and configuring yet another program, setting it up to run when I log in, forgetting to copy its configuration to my laptop, etc.
I wish there were “gmane for rss” — a site that ran nttp//rss for me and let me subscribe to any old feed using my news reader. Anybody know of one?
Wait! I have other complaints too! I’ll save those for later… I’m turning into the sort of person who wishes RSS were NNTP and that Common Lisp were popular again. What is happening to me?!?
13 Comments
i use gnus, but asynchronously downloading the feeds with wget in a cron job. you just need
to (setq nnrss-use-local t), and gnus will look for a group-name.xml in the nnrss folder instead of
connecting to the server. this stills takes a while if one has many feeds (i’ve got around
100), so i additionally put the nnrss groups at level 4 (S L 4 in the *Group* buffer), and
only every now and then do a ‘4 g’ to update them.
i can send you my bash script (which also handles atom feeds transforming them to rss via xslt) if
you need it.
I use http://rss2email.infogami.com/ . The blog postings are sent to me in e-mail, and I read them in Gnus along with the rest of my e-mail.
have you tried reader.google.com? (maybe that’s what you meant by igoogle?)
You can also use nnshimbun instead of nnrss. See
http://www.randomsample.de/dru5/node/45
It also supports asynchronous download of articles via w3m.
+1 for rss2email.
Works great, if I want a closer look, fire up your browser from straight from emacs, the url is in each mail.
I’m turning into the sort of person who wishes RSS were NNTP
You are not the only one. NNTP is better at what RSS tries to do in just about every way. Certainly anything that RSS has over NNTP would be better rectified by starting from NNTP as a base and making improvements than trying to take the plethora of the things that RSS didn’t learn from NNTP and trying to bolt them on there.
(I don’t mean RSS as the protocol per se, I mean the whole mode of communication that it engenders).
The old schoolers were thoughtful people.
Too bad we have to suffer the imbecility of the new-school blinken-lights mob.
One more vote for Google Reader. The feature which made me give up in disgust the first time I tried it — things getting marked as read when you scroll past them — I later found could be disabled.
Seriously, google reader is the way to go.
Another +1 for rss2email. I use it with Gnus and nnimap, and it feels very much like an rss-to-nntp gateway.
I am interested in integrating Google Reader with Gnus, my main concern is lock-in with Google but the service is really useful. I started a thread on the Gnus mailing list where I list resources and some thoughts: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.gnus.general/68855
Thanks, all. I’m giving rss2email a try, we’ll see how it goes.
[…] wrote a while ago about my blog-reading woes. Those woes are now […]
“I wish there were “gmane for rss””: It’s called Gwene.