Cataloguing Solaris groups

From: Eric Boutilier (bout_at_central.sun.com)
Date: 12/21/04 

Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 15:27:59 -0600
To: solarisx86@yahoogroups.com

I created an OPML file of major Solaris discussion groups
that provide RSS feeds. It can be downloaded here:

    http://www.speakeasy.org/~boutilier/import.xml

(An OPML file is a standard file format for sharing lists of RSS
feeds such as BLOGs. More on this later.)

This is part of my attempt to start maintaining a list of
"active" English-language Solaris groups and their attributes. I've
defined "active" to mean groups that have, on average, at least a few
messages posted per day (i.e. minimum 20 msgs per week). Following
are the ones I know of. Please let me know if I've missed any.

Name Traffic Native Format RSS Feed?
---- ------- ------------ ---------
comp.unix.solaris Very high Usenet Newsgroup Yes
solarisx86@yahoo High Mail-list Yes
sunmanagers.org Med Mail-list Yes
supportforum.sun.com Med Browser-only Yes
forum.sun.com Med Browser-only Soon
ITtoolbox solaris-l Low Mail-list No

Key:
  Very high ~= 500 - 700 msgs per week
  High ~= 300 - 500 "
  Medium ~= 100 - 300 "
  Low ~= 20 - 100 "

Although there are 6 groups in the list above, two of them don't
provide RSS feeds yet, therefore they aren't included in the
OPML file. Also, one of the RSS feeds in the file is not actually
a discussion group, it's a site that does on-the-fly aggregation of
blog entries on planetsun.org that contain the word Solaris. (The URL
for browsing the site is http://test.planetsun.com/solaris.)

<Run-on message alert>
 The rest of this message contains some findings,
 recommendations, and how-to info on the subject of RSS/OPML.
</Run-on message alert>

Personally, I have an account on bloglines.com for reading RSS
feeds. There are two really good things about Bloglines: It's
free, and it's easy for RSS newbies (like me) to get up and running
quickly. But Bloglines is web-based, and that makes it kinda slow
and klunky. So I actually recommend using a regular RSS reader app;
and since there are a lot of those out there, I went ahead and did
some "comparison shopping" on places like freshmeat.net. These are
the ones (for UNIX/Linux desktops) that piqued my interest the most:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Snownews:
  http://kiza.kcore.de/software/snownews

- RSSOwl
  http://rssowl.sourceforge.net

- Sage
  http://sage.mozdev.org/

- Thunderbird and Firefox also added RSS capabilities recently, but
  I think they lack a lot of features (like importing OPML files) that
  are standard with dedicated RSS readers and the bloglines service.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

To import the OPML file into a bloglines account, click on:

  My Feeds (tab near the top left corner)
    Edit (just under the tabs)
      Import Subscriptions (bottom of page)

To import it into RSSOwl, see:
http://rssowl.sourceforge.net/tutorial/en/ht_eximprint.html

To import it into Snownews, see:
http://kiza.kcore.de/software/snownews/download/patches/opml2snow

Here are a couple excellent (and short) articles on RSS:

Why is RSS Everywhere?
    http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.04/start.html?pg=7

Getting Started with RSS: The Fifteen-Minute Tutorial
    http://frl.bluehighways.com/frlarchives/000123.html

And finally, if you like reading specs, here's the one for OPML:
    http://opml.scripting.com/spec

Eric Boutilier
Sun Microsystems

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