From qs101@pelican.cl.cam.ac.uk Mon Feb 21 13:44:13 EST 1994
Article: 7481 of comp.infosystems.www
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.www
Path: bigblue.oit.unc.edu!concert!corpgate!news.utdallas.edu!wupost!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!warwick!pavo.csi.cam.ac.uk!nntp-serv.cam.ac.uk!qs101
From: qs101@pelican.cl.cam.ac.uk (Quentin Stafford-Fraser)
Subject: ANNOUNCE: Newslist 1.3
Message-ID: <QS101.94Feb14114335@pelican.cl.cam.ac.uk>
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Organization: U of Cambridge, England
Date: Mon, 14 Feb 1994 11:43:35 GMT
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Well, there were some technical problems with the previous posting,
and there were some unwanted features (Hm!) in the program itself.

Please try this greatly improved version!

Quentin


                             NEWSLIST
                             ========    
            A program to assist HTTP browsing of newsgroups
            ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

WWW browsers such as NCSA Mosaic allow the user to read newsgroup
articles by specifying the group name in a URL eg 'news:comp.answers'.

To browse through many groups, though, (and there are several thousand
of them) you really need a page or pages containing links to all the
groups. There are some good ones out there, for example,

    http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/DataSources/News/Groups/Overview.html

is the standard one at CERN, but it only shows the groups available there,
which may be rather different from those available on your machine.

Newslist is a program which creates a hierarchy of pages for you based
on the groups available from YOUR server. It is written in python - a
splendid interpreted object-oriented language which I suggest you get
right now from the directory /pub/python at ftp.cwi.nl, if you haven't
already got it. There is a description of python at the end of this
post for the benefit of the unitiated.

Descriptions of newsgroups can be added from a file with one group
per line. eg:

	alt.foo   Articles about foo
	comp.bar  Programming in 'bar' and related languages

A suitable list detailing most groups can be found at ftp.uu.net in
/uunet-info/newsgroups.gz.

In addition to python, you need:

	An NNTP-based news feed.
	A directory in which to put the pages.

This is an early version. The programming is not very beautiful, but
it works!  It comes with no warranty, express or implied, but with the
hope that some others may find it useful.

Comments, improvements & suggestions welcomed.
Quentin Stafford-Fraser