Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Wanted: RSS to NNTP gateway

Author:Ken MacLeod
Posted:11/17/1999; 11:55:50 AM
Topic:Wanted: RSS to NNTP gateway
Msg #:13159
Prev/Next:13157 / 13160

One problem with how weblogs and channels are often presented is that you never know which items you've seen and which items are new or changed. There needs to be a way to "check off" the ones you've read and have them not appear again unless they change.

The idea that occurred to me was that this is exactly what news readers support, once you "read" a message, it's marked as read and disappears.

An NNTP gateway for RSS would take RSS files, break them into items and "post" ones that are new or changed from the last read of the RSS file. The title of the RSS item or the first few words of the description would be used as the message title, with the body of the message being the whole description. The name of the group would be the reversed domain name of the site, and a channel name if there are multiple channels. I.e. com.scripting.www

This could be written as a batch script that posts to a real NNTP server or the gateway could be an NNTP server itself. There's a Perl module that implements a simple NNTP server (that serves messages from a mailbox) called NNML::Server that could be used for reference.

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