Snappy the Clam

I've been wanting to install the RSS reader Straw on my linux machines for awhile now, but could never get all the dependencies to work right. Then I read this eWeek article saying that Dag Wieër had built an rpm package for it. (BTW, eWeek, way to go on helpfully including a link to the repository in the article. Not.) So I got it and installed it.

Prior to this my Linux solution had been an account on Bloglines, which I think works pretty well, which is high praise for a browser-based RSS reader. I was very impressed at the ability to import an OPML file of subscriptions, which is my dealstopper requirement for an RSS reader. I primarily use Brent Simmons' you-already-know-how-excellent-it-is NetNewsWire on my Powerbook, and when I'm trying any new RSS reader, I need to import my subscriptions file from NNW.

But what this embarrassment of riches has led to is the problem of keeping all those subscriptions sync'd up over all those platforms - NNW, 2 separate instances of straw, and bloglines. It's really the same problem I had in the past with keeping my .newsrc sync'd up over the various NNTP readers I used to use. In that case I solved the problem by using just one copy of Gnus on my ISP shell host. It was centralized, but solved the platform problem - I could use any platform that had a terminal emulator or an X server. That won't work here, unless someone's planning on adding RSS capabilities to Gnus, which is a cool idea, now that I think of it. (Is there a RSS reader for emacs?) It would be great if readers could read a .syndrc from some network location, or develop some sort of p2p syncing capabilities, though this would be probably be hard to configure easily. If someone could come up with a file format for keeping track of read feed entries, and the aggregator developers could adopt it, it'd be pretty simple for apps to read this file and sync it up at startup and shutdown. I haven't looked at the Atom stuff lately, so I have no idea if this is something they've addressed. I'm staying away from that whole food fight.

As syndication takes continually stronger hold on the net, problems like this have to be solved.

Update: Good Christ. Emacs so entirely blows other editors away. Gnus does indeed do rss. Anyone want a BBEdit license I no longer need?