How I read news

I have tried several methods:

Reading from my isp while connected, with gnus speaking nntp directly to the newsserver. This works, and is easy to set up, but requires you to be connected while you're reading. This is what I'm doing now. (May, 2000) I'm currently using a .gnus file which does not have the server listed as either primary or secondary, and I go to the server buffer and open the server manually when I'm connected to read news. Then I deny the server when I disconnect. When I get elisp writing (and learning) energy, I'm thinking about writing a command that checks for whether I'm connected and opens the server if I am, and denies it if I'm not. Then I call this command as part of the get news hook.
Using suck to download the news from the isp. There are several methods for getting the news into gnus; I had trouble getting any of them to work.
Using leafnode to download news from the isp to the local leafnode server, and having gnus read it via nntp to the local server. This is what I use at work, and it works fine with a permanent fast internet connection. However, at home where I have a flaky dialup connection, it seems to routinely require more maintenance than I want to do. here is an explanation of how I did it when I was doing it.
Having the gnus agent download the news from the isp's newsserver and read it in gnus. I had this working for a while in the summer of 1999. Here is a description of what I had to do. It is probably out of date by now; specifically, the experimental version of gnus that I was using has since been released as gnus 5.8.2.

I said in the page I wrote while I was using the agent that I liked the agent philosophy better than the idea of running a newsserver for a single reader of news. I'm not sure this is true any more. I still think newsserver technology is overkill for what I do, but I also don't see that I need my editor to be involved in getting the news from the upstream server. At work I'm having xemacs speak smtp directly to the mailserver, and there are times when it's a nuisance that emacs hangs up because the smtp server I use is down. At least sysadmins believe they have to fix a broken mailserver, but a broken newsserver is seen as less critical.

Last modified: 2002-06-29 11:12, 2007
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