A new way to read techwr-l

[keith -at- soltys -dot- ca]

I've been a techwr-l member for many years, but I stopped getting the list
mail because I just couldn't keep up with the message traffic. I now
prefer to skim the message headers, looking for interesting messages or
threads. But the web interface is awkward and painfully slow.

Well, now there is a better way, combining old technology (the
bit.listserv.techwr-l Usenet feed) with Google Groups' new Atom feed
syndication and the Bloglines web feed aggregator. It sounds like a
mouthful, but it really is simple to do.

Note that what I'm describing here is only for reading techwr-l. If you
want to post or reply to messages, you'll need to use the web interface or
an email program.

First you need to need to set up a Bloglines account. Bloglines is a free
service that acts as an aggregator for RSS or Atom site syndication feeds,
which lets web sites publish updates that you can subscribe to through a
feed reader. There are lots of feed readers now, most are free, and if you
haven't tried one, you're missing the biggest thing to hit the Web since,
well, the Web. But I digress. (You can use any feed reader that can handle
an Atom syndication feed, if you prefer that to using the web-based
Bloglines.)

Go to www.bloglines.com and set up an account. It's free and they don't
want your entire life story. Subscribe to a few sites or weblogs to see
how it works. (It's dead simple, and they give you a list of popular sites
to pick from to make it easier.) Note the subscription field at the bottom
of the My Blogs page; you'll want to come back to this later.

Now go to Google. For some years, Google has been publishing Usenet
newsgroups on the Web.(If you don't know about Usenet, you can read more
about it in my article "Usenet for Technical Writers" on this site.)
Techwr-l has had a Usenet feed since it started; that was actually how I
first started reading it, via a BBS-Usenet bridge before I had Internet
access. You can read techwr-l on the newsgroup bit.listserv.techwr-l. You
could use the standard Google Groups interface to read it, but their new
feed syndication makes it even easier. Go to groups-beta.google.com and
search for techwr-l. Click on the bit.listserv.techwr-l link and you'll
see the most recent techwr-l messages.

Below the search field is a More link. Click it. You'll get a summary page
for the group that has all sorts of interesting information (links to each
month's messages and lists of the frequent contributors). At the bottom
there are links to the Atom syndication feeds. Right-click on Recent
Message Summaries and copy the link.

Now you want to go back to Bloglines. Paste the link into the subscription
field. You now have a page showing you the most recent techwr-l messages.
By default, Bloglines updates once an hour. Each time you come back to
Bloglines, you can click on your techwr-l link and see the most recent
postings. Note that only the beginning of each post is shown, but if you
click on the message subject you'll jump to the full message on Google.
You might find that there's a lag between when a message is posted on the
techwr-l list and when it shows up in Google Groups, but if you read the
list infrequently, that's probably not going to be an issue for you.

Why do it this way, and not use Google directly, you might ask? Well, you
certainly could, but the reason I use Bloglines is that I have the site
feeds for about thirty web sites on one web page, which I can read from
anywhere I have Internet access, showing all the most recent updates. It's
far, far, faster and easier to go here than jumping all over the Web. If I
want to reply to a techwr-l post, it takes a minute or two to get back to
the techwr-l site so I can post.

Tools like RSS and Atom feeds and aggregators like Bloglines are changing
the way we use the Internet. Try it out, I think you'll like it.

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