RSS and mailing lists
Chuq has an interesting piece about RSS and mailing lists, inspired by a post on Brent Simmons’ weblog about RSS and email.
I think Chuq’s making things a bit too difficult, or perhaps going a little too far. Or maybe he’s just looking farther into the future than I am. Anyway, the connection between RSS and mailing lists that I’d love — heck, I’d pay for this — could be done today. I just want to be able to read mailing lists, specifically Apple’s, via RSS. I subscribe to a number of lists that I don’t post to, or to which I’ll post so infrequently that I don’t mind going through a few extra steps when I do. But trudging through the 100+ email messages posted to carbon-development every day is a lot harder via Eudora than it would be via NetNewsWire. Part of that’s due to workflow issues — Eudora opens a new window for every message (which I normally like), but that works poorly when you’re just skimming through messages. NetNewsWire is faster than Eudora, it’s easier to mark many “messages” read at once in NNW, and messages in NNW expire so I don’t have to manually delete them the way I’d have to do that via email.
There are reasons why mail<->news gateways work very well for some mailing lists. Most of those reasons would apply to mail<->RSS feeds as well, even if posting wasn’t possible from the RSS side. I’d love to see someone — ideally Apple, though I probably can’t influence that — give it a shot.
Buzz Andersen Said,
August 28, 2003 @ 1:01 am
There is an RSS feed out there for cocoa-dev:
http://cocoa.mamasam.com/rss.php
But, then, you probably already knew that…
Diggory Laycock Said,
August 28, 2003 @ 2:14 am
I couldn’t survive without the Mamasam RSS feed
brian w Said,
August 28, 2003 @ 7:25 am
Your point is a very good one, but one quick note: You *could* turn on the view pane at the bottom of the mailing list’s window in Eudora. The setting will stick to that folder & not to others. Voila, you can down-arrow through the mailing list and read each message in turn without sacrificing individual-windows-per-message for other email.
Romain Said,
August 29, 2003 @ 7:11 am
Hi,
Did you try iList ? It’s a freeware app
http://www.macupdate.com/dev.php?id=10807 and it allows you to browse messages in Apple ML archives , download them as a .mbox file, save bookmarks for interesting messages, …
Of course it’s not perfect because it’s an Applescript Sudio app and I learned everything while coding it. But it might be useful. I am starting a cocoa version with a mix of webkit, regexes and css2 for displaying messages. I don’t know when I will finish it because I am a Cocoa beginer but the first experiments are quite encouraging.
If someone want to colaborate to such a projet, he is welcome…
Romain
Robert Au Said,
September 2, 2003 @ 10:43 am
I use gnus to read mail and news, and so it’s trivial to read a mailing list as if it were a newsgroup. For example, you can have score lists and automatic expiry. I wouldn’t at all mind using it to read RSS as well, except that its aggregator seems to be very slow right now. I don’t think there are any GUI clients with similar approaches, but I haven’t really looked.
Teal Sunglasses Said,
September 2, 2003 @ 11:05 pm
RSS and email(ing lists) links and references.
Links and references I’ve collected based on discussions going on around the net that I’ve used to build on some thoughts started here on RSS, email, mailing lists and the future of all this stuff… I’ve been reading and thinking about a lot of what’s…