There's more than one way to read RSS

Joe Friend's NewsGator solution

Joe Friend explains how to scan items efficiently with NewsGator:

There is a much better way to use it. Store all your newsfeeds in one folder and then use the "Group by..." feature to organize them by feed name. You can then navigate through all your feeds using the keyboard. Turning on the preview pane is best.

I had thought of that, but didn't find a feed name to group on. Greg Reinacker set me straight: it's a user-defined field, so you have to dig for it. View -> Current View -> Customize Current View -> Fields -> User Defined Fields -> .... hey, shouldn't there be an URL that gets you there?

This is excellent. Now that everything's in one folder, it can be set to view only unread messages, and I can step through them a keystroke at a time. Thanks, guys!

Meanwhile, several folks pointed me to nntp/rss, a Java-based lightweight NNTP server that can relay RSS feeds into an NNTP newsreader. And the docs hint at more:

Let's just say nntp\//rss is great at letting you read RSS feeds through your newsreader, but NNTP is a two-way protocol. The next version of nntp\//rss will begin to close the loop...

I haven't tried this yet, but being an old NNTP hand, I surely will. Lots of choices. I love open protocols!

Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2003/02/20.html#a610