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About elmo-rss

Since Kazuhiro-san has been so kind as to merge my RSS/Atom code into Wanderlust, I guess I may as well say a few words about how to use it. 


# Quick start
Before you continue, please update to the latest git version of WL, and say 

  m a rss:https://github.com/wanderlust/wanderlust/commits/master.atom
and browse Wanderlust's recent commit history. Mouse-2 on the URL at the bottom of a message should open a browser with the full commit. 


# How I use it
I start a normal day by checking my mail (both private and professional) and a number of work-related maling lists. I then check my inbox on our local GitLab instance (a git-related web service), and, usually but not always, my notifications on Github. This means that I need to start a stupid web browser and visit two stupid websites.
In principle, I could set up mail notifications for both gitlab and github and filter them into dedicated mailboxes. Ideally, however, I'd prefer to pull updates over NNTP or IMAP. While neither site offers a proper protocol, they do provide RSS/Atom feeds, which are almost as good. 

With elmo-rss installed, I just put the following into my .folders file:

  rss:https://github.com/jech.private.atom?token=TOPSECRETCODE "github"
Since I don't want RSS (and NNTP) downloads to slow down Wanderlust's startup, I also say 

  (setq wl-auto-uncheck-folder-list '("^\\$" "^rss:" "^-"))

which means that I need to press "s" in order to see any new updates.


# Dealing with expiry
RSS and Atom are very stupid protocols, and in order to compensate, typical feeds only keep the last 20 messages or so. Elmo-rss doesn't attempt to work around that -- you'll only see the last 20 messages, and older messages will silently disappear. This is fine for my usage, since I only use elmo-rss to see if there's anything new -- if there is, I go to the website.
If you want your RSS feed to be persistent, just combine it with a pipe folder: 

  m a +lwn
  m a |rss:http://lwn.net/http://lwn.net/headlines/newrss|+lwn
This will automatically copy every message into the +lwn folder the first time you see it. Of course, if you don't check the folder sufficiently often, you may still miss some updates. 

(If the feed is public, http://gwene.org might be a better solution.)


# Why not shimbun?
Wanderlust already has a RSS reader, called Shimbun. Shimbun has plenty of cool features, such as automatically fetching the content associated with an RSS or Atom entry, but it requires a non-trivial amount of configuration. After staring at the documentation and the code for a while, I decided that it's a little overkill for my needs. 


# Why not a proper reader?
There exist a number of RSS readers, including a rather nice one for Emacs (elfeed). However, these readers are designed for people who want to read all of their RSS feeds -- they are not really designed for the kind of "quickly check what's new" usage that I have in mind. It's much more convenient for me to have a quick look at the Wanderlust summary, then press c. 

-- Juliusz