27th Jan 2008
Following php.internals and the lack of a good web based NNTP reader
I often read blog posts and have heard the guys at work talking about the php.internals mailing list also with new PDO mailing list which is where all the PDOv2 debates will be taking place I decided it was about time I start following these lists.
So I started looking around for a way to do this. Here are my requirements. I don’t want to be tied to one computer and I want my reader to remember which posts I’ve read.
Try as I might I’ve not been able to to find anything that will let me do that with NNTP. I did find http://news.php.net/ this is a web based archive of the php mailing lists so I’d found my not being tied to one computer solution. Now I just needed a way for it to remember which posts I’d read.
For most lists support for RSS and RDF is available so I added a subscription to my feed reader (Google Reader if you care) and now I have tracking of what I have read.
Now I have a very different problem the content in the feeds is not what I need. I was expecting the title of each item to be the subject of the email with the autor directly after the subject and the descripton to be the body of the email possibly truncated. In fact what you get is the item title is just the subject of the email and the description is the author of the email.
To remedy this I created a Yahoo! Pipes application that would read the feed pull out the link to the full email page and then pull the contents of that page and set that as the description. I also took, with some regex, the author name that was in the original description and added it to the title.
I’d never used pipes before and it was not easy it took me a long time to get close to want I wanted and I still have a few niggling issues with my feed so I think I will write my own script to do the same thing so I can have complete control over the output. One it’s dome I’ll post it so other can use it if they would like.
I also have a very similar problem with DVD release feeds I just can’t find one that suites all I want. I’m starting to think that as time moves forward that feed providers need to add some level of configurability to there feed services so people can tailer them to what they really want.
I often read blog posts and have heard the guys at work talking about the php.internals mailing list also with new PDO mailing list which is where all the PDOv2 debates will be taking place I decided it was about time I start following these lists.
So I started looking around for a way to do this. Here are my requirements. I don’t want to be tied to one computer and I want my reader to remember which posts I’ve read.
Try as I might I’ve not been able to to find anything that will let me do that with NNTP. I did find http://news.php.net/ this is a web based archive of the php mailing lists so I’d found my not being tied to one computer solution. Now I just needed a way for it to remember which posts I’d read.
For most lists support for RSS and RDF is available so I added a subscription to my feed reader (Google Reader if you care) and now I have tracking of what I have read.
Now I have a very different problem the content in the feeds is not what I need. I was expecting the title of each item to be the subject of the email with the autor directly after the subject and the descripton to be the body of the email possibly truncated. In fact what you get is the item title is just the subject of the email and the description is the author of the email.
To remedy this I created a Yahoo! Pipes application that would read the feed pull out the link to the full email page and then pull the contents of that page and set that as the description. I also took, with some regex, the author name that was in the original description and added it to the title.
I’d never used pipes before and it was not easy it took me a long time to get close to want I wanted and I still have a few niggling issues with my feed so I think I will write my own script to do the same thing so I can have complete control over the output. One it’s dome I’ll post it so other can use it if they would like.
I also have a very similar problem with DVD release feeds I just can’t find one that suites all I want. I’m starting to think that as time moves forward that feed providers need to add some level of configurability to there feed services so people can tailer them to what they really want.
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