Usenet to RSS

01 March 2004

I’ve been looking for a way to harness the power of Usenet for the Web. I found the nntp2rss script which lets you pull up to 25 items from a Usenet group and export it to RSS. A nice feature of the script is that you can choose to have the link to the article open the Google Groups page. (Sample XML)

After setting it up, the problems for the casual user became obvious.

  1. updating: depending on how fresh the news server you use to create the feed is, Google may be far behind in archiving the article you’re looking for. The end result? Frustration from clicking the link and getting a thread-not-found error.
  2. spam: Usenet is full of junk posts and there’s nothing preventing them from getting into your RSS feed. I wonder if there’s a way to implement a killfile?
  3. descriptions (lack of): all you get is the title or subject of the post, you don’t get even X number of characters of the post itself. Basically you are just reading the subject header of the last X number of posts.

Nevertheless, for some Usenet junkies this may be acceptable. I think this would be great for technical classes like computer languages.

Also, thanks to Andy Carvin for pointing me to a couple of promising tools for converting discussion lists to RSS feeds: MailBucket and DodgeIt. More to come on those later.

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