+++ Thursday 17 July 2025 +++

OCC25 Gnus for reading Usenet and RSS-feeds
===========================================

Emacs Gnus is the built-in Usenet client in GNU Emacs.

I copies my `.newsrc.eld' from my daily driver to the Power Mac
G4, and created a small Gnus config file `~/.gnus.el' file. More
was not needed.

Reading Usenet posts
--------------------

In the Gnus config file I only set the URL of the Usenet-provider,
and omitted the line to select an encrypted SSL-connection and the
line with port 563.  Without these lines, Gnus connects to the
Usenet-server and collects the status of the subscribed
newsgroups.

Usenet posts tends to be formatted in plain text, reading
those is fine of course.

gmane.io and gwene.org
----------------------
Gmane.io and gwene.org provide wonderful services to follow
mailinglists and RSS-feeds.

gmane.io is a mailinglist-to-nntp service. For each supported
mailinglist it provides a separate newsgroup. 

gwene.org is a RSS-feed-to-nntp service. For each supported 
RSS-feed it provides a separate newsgroup.

Bridging mailinglists and RSS-feeds to nntp is a briliiant
idea. Usenet readers are very good at knowing which messages have
been visited and filtering interesting information.

Using the services from gmane.io and gwene.org I follow a number
of mailinglists and RSS-feeds.

Maillinglist messages tend to be formatted in plain text, reading
those is again fine.

Following RSS-feeds
-------------------
The experience following RSS-feeds using the older Emacs versions
depends very much on how the specific feed is created.

Some RSS-feeds contain the full entry of each item. Opening an
item results usually in a good readable post, but the text can
also be formatted as html..

Some posts contain just a very short introduction) and 
a link to the post. That is an https link, of course.

And many posts only contain a link, also https of course.

So here we have two problems:
- Posts are formatted in html.
- Links to https pages.

w3
--
In order to render html formatted text, I downloaded w3 from
https://archive.org/download/emacs-w3-evolt_browsers/4.0.47/

The standard ./configure, make, make install trio works, and
it gets compiled and installed (sudo make install).

Unfortunately, it has bugs and I can't open anything with it.
Which means, I have to look further :)


Last edited: $Date: 2025/07/17 12:08:08 $