I wrote a while ago about my blog-reading woes. Those woes are now over!
Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen, of Gnus and gmane fame, has now brought us gwene — an RSS to NNTP gateway. You enter the feeds you want to read, and soon they show up as newsgroups in gmane. Thanks also should go to Ted Zlanatov, for bringing this up on the gmane discussion list, and thus getting it all rolling.
I haven’t quite retired my rss2email cron job, but that is mostly out of laziness. Any day now.
Normally I am unhappy about the whole SaaS trend, but gmane gets a pass. I am not sure if it is because Lars seems trustworthy, or because NNTP is so obviously a fringe interest, or because gmane is at least theoretically replaceable in the event of the worst.
4 Comments
It would be cool if the bridge could handle blog post comments submitting as well. I bet that’s a hard problem to solve.
Hooray! A palliative in dealing with the abomination that is
RSS. Unfortunately it doesn’t solve the posting problem (and that
can’t really be solve in any reasonable way without publisher’s
cooperation).
I wonder when all the new kids will finally re-invent Usenet so we can
finally get back to where we were in 1986 and start fixing it.
Goodbye Google reader. I’ve been waiting to put you out of your misery
for a long time.
The other thing it really doesn’t solve is comment feeds which is
handled insanely in RSS, namely a feed which is independent and
contains no references to or from the post to which it is
associated. This makes it maddening to try to follow the posts and
comments for a particular blog.
Again, something very basic that is handled appropriately in NNTP and
is a complete disaster in RSS-land.