Reading Ruby-Talk in Atom or RSS

ruby-talk
1

The recent "moderation" thread raised several questions in my mind. I'm interested in what others are doing about this:

1. Is there a decent threaded RSS or Atom reader on OSX? One not inside an email client?
2. Is there a way to subscribe to ruby-talk but not receive email? AFICT, it's email and either on or off.
3. Is there an RSS or Atom feed for ruby-talk other than from the mirrors?

Sorry for all the questions, but the "moderation" thread raised an important point: Grouping by thread and reading in a news reader may be preferable to getting individual emails. Worth a try.

Thanks

(Sorry if this is a re-post)

2

Apple Mail does a great job of grouping emails by thread for me.

···

On Apr 15, 2010, at 3:00 PM, steve ross wrote:

1. Is there a decent threaded RSS or Atom reader on OSX? One not inside an email client?

--
Zach Moazeni

3

Ruby-forum.com does indeed have RSS feeds, though I don't know if it
would thread well in any readers or not. When I have some time later
I'll set feed2imap to reading fetching it and see if Thunderbird threads
it properly.

···

On 4/15/2010 1:00 PM, steve ross wrote:

The recent "moderation" thread raised several questions in my mind. I'm interested in what others are doing about this:

1. Is there a decent threaded RSS or Atom reader on OSX? One not inside an email client?
2. Is there a way to subscribe to ruby-talk but not receive email? AFICT, it's email and either on or off.
3. Is there an RSS or Atom feed for ruby-talk other than from the mirrors?

Sorry for all the questions, but the "moderation" thread raised an important point: Grouping by thread and reading in a news reader may be preferable to getting individual emails. Worth a try.

Thanks

(Sorry if this is a re-post)

4

steve ross wrote:

The recent "moderation" thread raised several questions in my mind. I'm interested in what others are doing about this:

1. Is there a decent threaded RSS or Atom reader on OSX? One not inside an email client?
2. Is there a way to subscribe to ruby-talk but not receive email? AFICT, it's email and either on or off.
3. Is there an RSS or Atom feed for ruby-talk other than from the mirrors?

Sorry for all the questions, but the "moderation" thread raised an
important point: Grouping by thread and reading in a news reader

                                                       ^^^^^^^^^^^

may be preferable to getting individual emails. Worth a try.

Man, am I really *that* old? To me, "news reader" means "Usenet
client", not "feed reader".

Which, incidentally, is how *I* read ruby-talk, ehm sorry, I meant it
is how I read *comp.lang.ruby*. And it works like a charm, mainly
because, unlike e-mail, RSS and Atom, Usenet was *specifically
designed* for discussion.

Threading works perfectly, because proper threading support is
actually a required part of the standard since day 1. Unlike e-mail,
where threading only works if both the sender and the recipient
implement it properly (and it is *not* a required part of the
standard, so there *are* actually mail clients which *don't* do it
properly, including this thing called GMail that you might have heard
of).

[Actually, to be fair, there are sometimes threading problems. But
they don't happen in the Usenet. They only happen when someone uses a
broken e-mail program to post to ruby-talk and then the
ruby-talk-to-comp.lang.ruby gateway can't figure out which thread the
mail belongs to.]

It's basically an instance of "use the right tool for the job". E-mail
is for 1-1 communication, Atom is for 1-many, Usenet is for many-many.
Ruby-talk is many-many, ergo Usenet is the only sane choice.

Anyway, this doesn't really answer your question, but it is a viable
alternate solution. It's pretty simple, really: all Usenet clients
have awesome threading support, because a) the standard requires it
and b) they would be useless otherwise. (There are newsgroups which
get literally several orders of magnitude more traffic than
comp.lang.ruby, Usenet clients simply *have* to have good support for
threading and filtering.)

That was my 2c.

jwm

5

1. Is there a decent threaded RSS or Atom reader on OSX? One not inside an email client?

Apple Mail does a great job of grouping emails by thread for me.

Really? I tried this, sorted by date descending, and organized by thread, but it only got the right answer once in a while. I'll have to give it another chance. Any further hints what I might be doing wrong (I'm on latest Mail, snowy).

Thanks

···

On Apr 15, 2010, at 12:15 PM, Zach Moazeni wrote:

On Apr 15, 2010, at 3:00 PM, steve ross wrote:

--
Zach Moazeni
http://simplechatter.com

6

Ruby-forum.com does indeed have RSS feeds, though I don't know if it
would thread well in any readers or not. When I have some time later
I'll set feed2imap to reading fetching it and see if Thunderbird threads
it properly.

I thought Thunderbird worked as a standalone RSS reader? At least it
used to. I haven't used it in some time.

Google Groups also provides RSS feeds for the newsgroup, links here:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ruby/feeds

-Jonathan Nielsen

7

steve ross wrote:

The recent "moderation" thread raised several questions in my mind. I'm interested in what others are doing about this:

1. Is there a decent threaded RSS or Atom reader on OSX? One not inside an email client?
2. Is there a way to subscribe to ruby-talk but not receive email? AFICT, it's email and either on or off.
3. Is there an RSS or Atom feed for ruby-talk other than from the mirrors?

Sorry for all the questions, but the "moderation" thread raised an
important point: Grouping by thread and reading in a news reader

                                                      ^^^^^^^^^^^

may be preferable to getting individual emails. Worth a try.

Man, am I really *that* old? To me, "news reader" means "Usenet
client", not "feed reader".

Right you are. My terminology stands corrected. The problem with Usenet
-- actually, the problem with the lists I read -- is that many, if not
most are not mirrored on Usenet. For e.g., I can't find any of the Google
Groups like rSpec, Rails, Haml, etc. mirrored on Usenet.

Which, incidentally, is how *I* read ruby-talk, ehm sorry, I meant it
is how I read *comp.lang.ruby*. And it works like a charm, mainly
because, unlike e-mail, RSS and Atom, Usenet was *specifically
designed* for discussion.

Threading works perfectly, because proper threading support is
actually a required part of the standard since day 1. Unlike e-mail,
where threading only works if both the sender and the recipient
implement it properly (and it is *not* a required part of the
standard, so there *are* actually mail clients which *don't* do it
properly, including this thing called GMail that you might have heard
of).

I will grant you that threading works infinitely better in a Usenet
reader. But, again, many of the lists I read are syndicated via RSS
or Atom and not mirrored to Usenet :frowning:

[Actually, to be fair, there are sometimes threading problems. But
they don't happen in the Usenet. They only happen when someone uses a
broken e-mail program to post to ruby-talk and then the
ruby-talk-to-comp.lang.ruby gateway can't figure out which thread the
mail belongs to.]

It's basically an instance of "use the right tool for the job". E-mail
is for 1-1 communication, Atom is for 1-many, Usenet is for many-many.
Ruby-talk is many-many, ergo Usenet is the only sane choice.

Anyway, this doesn't really answer your question, but it is a viable
alternate solution. It's pretty simple, really: all Usenet clients
have awesome threading support, because a) the standard requires it
and b) they would be useless otherwise. (There are newsgroups which
get literally several orders of magnitude more traffic than
comp.lang.ruby, Usenet clients simply *have* to have good support for
threading and filtering.)

If I'm just missing some Usenet groups, I'm sure happier with that as
a solution, but my impression is that as long as people are putting stuff
on Google Groups, the mirroring to Usenet will be limited. Yes?

That was my 2c.

jwm

And a good $.02 it was!

···

On Apr 17, 2010, at 6:17 AM, Jörg W Mittag wrote:

8

Jonathan Nielsen wrote:

Ruby-forum.com does indeed have RSS feeds, though I don't know if it
would thread well in any readers or not. When I have some time later
I'll set feed2imap to reading fetching it and see if Thunderbird threads
it properly.
    
I thought Thunderbird worked as a standalone RSS reader? At least it
used to. I haven't used it in some time.

Google Groups also provides RSS feeds for the newsgroup, links here:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ruby/feeds

-Jonathan Nielsen

Yes, Thunderbird can do RSS and newsgroup feeds. Of course, it can also show a threaded view of emails.

-Justin

9

If it is, I don't know how it's done. The main reason that I was
thinking feed2imap is that I don't know of any threaded RSS/Atom readers
(but then, all the feeds I track I'm using feed2imap anyway) whereas I
know plenty of threaded mail clients. It's a long shot, but I'm hoping
that the threaded information is in the RSS feed (can RSS feeds be
threaded? I'll have to look that up) and will translate (but when does
anything ever work that perfectly out of the box?).

I'll check the Google Groups feeds too and see what I get.

···

On 4/15/2010 1:29 PM, Jonathan Nielsen wrote:

Ruby-forum.com does indeed have RSS feeds, though I don't know if it
would thread well in any readers or not. When I have some time later
I'll set feed2imap to reading fetching it and see if Thunderbird threads
it properly.
    

I thought Thunderbird worked as a standalone RSS reader? At least it
used to. I haven't used it in some time.

Google Groups also provides RSS feeds for the newsgroup, links here:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ruby/feeds

-Jonathan Nielsen

10

steve ross wrote:

[...] The problem with Usenet
-- actually, the problem with the lists I read -- is that many, if not
most are not mirrored on Usenet. For e.g., I can't find any of the Google
Groups like rSpec, Rails, Haml, etc. mirrored on Usenet.

Are you talking specifically about Google Groups or about those
projects' mailinglists? If the latter, try these:

  gmane.comp.lang.ruby.rspec.user

  gmane.comp.lang.ruby.rails

  gmane.comp.lang.ruby.rails.core

  gmane.comp.lang.ruby.rails.haml

All available on news.gmane.org.

But you are right: Google Groups is a problem. (Which is a shame,
considering that it started out as a friggin' Usenet archive in the
first place. The fact that a Usenet archive closes off its archives
from the Usenet would be pretty hilarious if it wasn't so damn
annoying.)

I'm not sure whether you can add Google Groups to GMANE and whether
that is even allowed by Google Groups' Terms Of Service.

I will grant you that threading works infinitely better in a Usenet
reader. But, again, many of the lists I read are syndicated via RSS
or Atom and not mirrored to Usenet :frowning:

You can mirror all mailinglists to Usenet via GMANE. GMANE even
understands the protocols of many of the popular listmanagers so that
it can automatically subscribe and unsubscribe, for example.

jwm

···

On Apr 17, 2010, at 6:17 AM, Jörg W Mittag wrote: