The English Cemetery

Gmane , terrific service, linking mailing-lists, Usenet groups, web archives and RSS feeds... Thanks to this last feature added, there's now a way to display Gmane postings of any newsgroup in any web page

1. Given the Gmane name of any newsgroup, get the RSS address of it. For instance, for the main Gmane.discuss group it is http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.discuss
2. Now visit http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/index.php?s=build . Enter your RSS address into the text field and select your preferred options (only titles, titles + description, number of items to show...)
3. Click on PREVIEW THE FEED until you get satisfied with the options, and then click on GENERATE JAVASCRIPT
4. On the next page, you'll find the Javascript you'll need to include the links on your site. Copy that code.
5. Paste that line of Javascript into the source of your Web page. Save. Load in a browser. There it is.
6. You can apply styles to re-design the appearence of the links displayed following information at this page

A Basque working example, with it's own explanation, at this page related to newsgroup gmane.culture.language.basque.dantzan

This is about a section we've named Jamaika at Sustatu.com, a Basque collective weblog. Sustatu is a sort-of-Kuro5hin, culture, tech and general interest issues posted and commented by visitors, but in a quite different scale: only 0.6 million people speak Basque.

There it is: www.sustatu.com/jamaika

PURPOSE: Posts in Sustatu are like in other collective weblogs as Kuro5hin or Slashdot: they're edited and moderated, and mostly are somehow ellaborate (a summary and then some more or less lengthy paragraphs). We just wanted to add another option (easier, more straightforward) to readers and editors: a link and a comment, just a few words. Another channel for more telegraphic news items from the net: a curiosity, breaking news, an invitiation to visit a given site...

SOLUTION: We solved the issue with del.icio.us. It's simple: we invit users to add what they like to del.icio.us with a specific tag: sustaturako (for Sustatu, in Basque, a particular term that probably will not be used by anyone else, if not to let their reference be listed at Sustatu). Then we parse the RSS file of that tag's page at del.icio.us and there it is.

SOFTWARE: Sustatu.com is a Zope website and for this del.icio.us thing we added an app based in Mark Pilgrim's Feed Parser written in Python. It's cached and fed every 30 minutes, so the latest additions at del.icio.us/tag/sustaturako appear shortly afterwards at www.sustatu.com/jamaika

We announced this feature last week, and added a page with explanations. Few Basques use del.icio.us, as far as we know. So, the how-to page includes quite detailed instructions. We also encourage users to make full use of del.icio.us for their bookmarking and reference work, not just as a way to feed Sustatu.

The name for the feature is Jamaika ikusteko jaio gara, a false quotation by Bob Marley. In English it means, we have been born to see Jamaica which is just nonsense, but in Basque it has 2nd and 3rd meanings, both very funny and fitting to this feature.