Integrating RSS, E-Mail, and Usenet. Mozilla? (by Jeremy Zawodny)

Hm. It looks like Simon wants to integrate his mail, news, and rss/weblog reading into a single application. In his case, that application is gnus the killer Mail/News reader for Emacs. What he's saying really hits home for me. I recently wrote about my frustrations with RSS aggregators too.

I have to agree with Simon. Having an rss back-end for gnus would be excellent. However, I'd like to go a step further and propose something for those GUI inclined folks (not necessarily me, since I use mutt to read mail): Mozilla needs RSS aggregation capabilities.

Think about it. All the pieces are there. Mozilla is infinitely scriptable. It certainly knows how to fetch content via HTTP. It knows how to parse XML. Building a UI with Mozilla isn't terribly difficult.

Is anyone working on this. If not, why? This seems like a killer app. Put Mail, News, and Weblogs on equal footing in the only Open Source cross-platform platform (that's not a typo) we have.

I ran a quick google search to see who's working with RSS and Mozilla. I found a few interesting items:

using protozilla - here's a weblog entry about it
a weblog entry proposing something similar
Mark suggests an RSS sidebar for Mozilla (read down a few paragraphs on that page) and even points to the sidebar programming docs

And there's some RDF info on mozilla.org too.

But as far as I can tell, nobody has done this. Hmm. Someone really should.

Posted by jzawodn at September 14, 2002 08:23 PM

Reader Comments

# Andyed said:

Mike Lee's working on RSS aggregation in http://mozblog.mozdev.orgNot sure how far along he is -- prerelease certainly.See his blog at http://www.exitspace.net/mike/blog/

on September 15, 2002 05:30 PM

# cos said:

Actually, Oort Gnus (the current development branch) has had an "nnrss" backend since last year some time. works great, but Gnus isn't for everyone, certainky...

on September 15, 2002 05:53 PM

# wari said:

I used hep messaging server for my RSS to email and email to blog needs. And since RSS becomes a simple message (which I use mutt and mozilla to read), you can doo all sort of things with it, like sorting, etc.

Hep is at http://fettig.net/projects/hep/

on November 4, 2002 07:48 AM

# Richard Soderberg said:

NewsMonster is an RSS reader for Mozilla, and seems to be fully developed, too.

on June 15, 2003 09:02 PM

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