{"id":625,"date":"2002-09-22T09:19:00","date_gmt":"2002-09-22T16:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2002\/09\/22\/625.html"},"modified":"2002-09-22T09:19:00","modified_gmt":"2002-09-22T16:19:00","slug":"newsgroups","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2002\/09\/22\/newsgroups\/","title":{"rendered":"Newsgroups"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Mary Anne mentioned newsgroups in a journal entry this morning.  Wanted to point people (especially OS X users) to three resources:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/groups.google.com\/grphp\">Google groups<\/a> is a reasonably nice Web-based interface to the newsgroups.  You can navigate the group hierarchies, find the group you're looking for (such as <a href=\"http:\/\/groups.google.com\/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&group=rec.arts.sf.written\">rec.arts.sf.written<\/a>), and click a link to a particular thread, which gives you a reasonably nice hierachical interface to viewing the messages in the thread.<\/li>\n<li>Simon Fraser (you've met him, Mary Anne; in fact, you even have pictures of him in your journal) is the author of a Mac application called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.smfr.org\/mtnw\/\">MT-NewsWatcher<\/a>.  It's derived from an older application called NewsWatcher, but the latest OS X versions of MT-NewsWatcher are much better than the original app.  (The original NewsWatcher has evolved into a payware app called Thoth, which isn't bad, but I like MT-NewsWatcher better, and MT-NewsWatcher is free.)  The interface for getting set up doesn't quite fit my expected mental model, so I find it a little tricky, but once you're set up, it's pretty easy to use.  It doesn't quite have the same kind of hierarchy-view that trn (which really fit my head) had, but it does provide a collapsible hierarchical view of the threads.  One advantage over Google groups: you can point MT-NewsWatcher to any news server, so you can (for example) read the sff.net newsgroups using it, which is a much nicer way to do that than their (admittedly quite usable) Web interface.<\/li>\n<li>Of course, another option for OS X users is to install trn locally.  (Yay, desktop UNIX!) I haven't done this, but it should be possible.  But I'm not sure whether you can point trn to a non-local news server; you might have to get a news feed on your OS X box to be able to view news there.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As for alt.callahans, the first two Tall Tales I posted there (\"<a href=\"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/logos\/things\/callahan\/wine.html\">Horses Sweeter Than Wine<\/a>\" and \"<a href=\"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/logos\/things\/callahan\/electric.html\">Power Corrupts<\/a>\") are dated April and May 1990, which must've been during the second period when I was briefly a regular there.  (I had hung out there for a while back at the very beginning; I don't even remember when that was.)  I never posted very much, but read it avidly.  Apparently I came back five years later (during a brief return to newsreading while I was at SGI) to post another Tall Tale (\"<a href=\"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/logos\/things\/callahan\/dentist.html\">Night of the Dentist<\/a>\"), and stuck around for a couple days but not for long.  Reading all the newsgroups I'm interested in would be more than a 24-hour-a-day job.  (There was even a time when I was only reading a couple of newsgroups that were in my second tier of interestingness, because I knew the first-tier ones would be an infinite time-sink.)  So mostly I just stay away.<\/p>\n<p>(So perhaps I'm not doing anyone a service by pointing to ways to read news.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.)<\/p>\n<p>I do sometimes think it'd be nice for SH to have more of a presence on the newsgroups, but I don't think that strongly enough to go become that presence.<\/p>\n<p>Addendum re those Tall Tales: I think they were among the first things I posted to my Web site (in late '95), which at the time consisted of a few pages hosted on a server that SGI provided for employees to create personal sites.  .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;Well, okay, I'm not actually sure when I started the site; it looks like Cosmo Create, the SGI Web-authoring tool, first came out in '93 or so, and I was involved in documenting that (I believe the slogan was \"Author and Serve,\" since the authoring tool was mostly there to sell the Web server), and I think I started creating my own pages right around then.  Further research is indicated.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mary Anne mentioned newsgroups in a journal entry this morning. Wanted to point people (especially OS X users) to three&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}